Word: milhaud
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Togetherness. Such Happenings set just the right tone for a festival honoring the 70th year of Darius Milhaud, and when Composer Milhaud turned up in the Mills Concert Hall, he had a Happening of his own ready to fit the occasion. The hall was aswim with students, colleagues and devotees as Milhaud conducted the first performance of the 401st composition of his long career-a Suite de Quatrains for seven instruments and the speaking voice of his wife Madeleine. To the delight of the admiring audience, the Suite turned out to be a "chance" work, in which all seven players...
...weekend of musical homage that amounted to a Milhaud retrospective (with performances of his Caramel Mou: Shimmy for Jazz Band and Singer, a string quartet, a ballet, 'Adame Miroir, and his one-act opera Medea), local critics rejoiced in "the new turn" Milhaud's futuristic Suite suggested. But to Milhaud himself the new turn was only a pleasant reminiscence of work he did 40 years ago. "Now that everyone else is doing these things," he said cheerlessly, "they think I am following their steps. That is part of the general misunderstanding a composer faces all his life...
Form's Conscience. Since nothing heftier than a lingering lyricism is common to his varied compositions, Milhaud has been particularly vulnerable to misunderstanding-or simple dislike-all his life. In his days with the Groupe des Six in Paris, he expanded music's language with his studies of polytonality, meter and counterpoint, but he also wrote music that was crippled by flat jokes, banalities and topical trivia. He has written music for text by the Catholic laureate Paul Claudel-and also a Bar Mitzvah cantata for Israel's 13th birthday. With 15 operas, 12 symphonies, 25 film...
Died. Francis Poulenc, 64, prolific French composer, a tall, ruddy-faced man with a boisterous Gallic wit, who at 18 wrote his piano showpiece Perpetual Motion, shortly thereafter joined the rebellious "Les Six," a group of young composers (among them: Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, Georges Auric) that left a bright mark on contemporary French music; of a heart attack; in Paris. In later years Poulenc's gay, airy theatrical music gave way to a more highly sustained and emotional style in such formidable pieces as The Dialogues of the Carmelites, a melodic opera based on the 1789 martyrdom...
...palmy years, from 1890 to 1925, the Monte Carlo gave the world premieres of major works by Berlioz, Ravel, Faure, Honegger, Poulenc and Milhaud, attracted the famed Diaghilev Ballet. More recently it had become little more than a second-rate casino group catering to the international gambling set. Then, six years ago, in an effort to alter the popular, frivolous image of Monte Carlo as a playboy playground. Rainier set out to refurbish his concert orchestra. His first-and canniest-move was to hire ex-French Foreign Legion Officer Frémaux...