Word: milhaud
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David Avshalamov, the soloist in Milhaud's Percussion Concerto made the opening piece fun to watch, pulling one instrument after another--including a dilapidated Fourth-of-July noisemaker--from a cache under his row of drums. His engaging performance made it hard to concentrate on the music, and it was just as well, for musically the piece is quite dull...
...months of study with Composer Paul Hindemith at Yale didn't help matters much; he lost 25 Ibs. and suffered a nervous breakdown. "I couldn't take his Prussian taskmaster tactics," says Bazelon. Bazelon eventually 'fled to California to study at Mills College with Composer Darius Milhaud, and in 1948 decided to strike out on his own. For the next seven years he worked in Manhattan as a railroad reservations clerk and wrote music on the side...
...interested in women," he chuckles). He shared an apartment with a count, tooled around the boulevards in "a little carriage," and "was thin as a stick because I never went to bed until the morning." On Saturday nights he toured the cafes with a bunch of the boys?Milhaud, Auric, Poulenc?and helped popularize their music, as well as that of his friends Debussy, Saint-Saens, Ravel and Heitor Villa-Lobos (whom he had discovered playing the cello in the pit of a Rio de Janeiro movie theater...
...Milhaud conducted sitting down, but with burly authority. The score opened with a fast descending scale on the strings joined by the brassy blare of trumpets. Four stark downbeats on the kettle drums were omens of doom. Cracking fortissimos rapidly fading to a whispered diminuendo, an accumulation of dissonant agonized tones, a carefree pastoral legato phrase, and a lamenting melody on a reedy oboe vividly characterized the fateful day in Dallas and the President's oblivious ride to his death...
Commissioned by the Oakland Symphony on Nov. 23, 1963, Milhaud wrote the 31-minute piece in 24 hours. It was premiered in Oakland on Dec. 3. "I was a great admirer of Kennedy or I would never have written it," says Milhaud: "It was a privilege to be offered an occasion to express my sorrow...