Word: milhaud
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...Turkey. Even with reduced scoring at the Chapel Hill performance, Brubeck's oratorio attested the composer's solid training as a serious musician, mostly under the eye of the French master Darius Milhaud at Mills College in Oakland, Calif. In twelve extensive, complex vocal movements, it traces a series of meditations on the universality of faith, with textual fragments drawn by Brubeck and his wife lola from the Gospels and Psalms. What little jazz there is in the score is far removed from the usual Brubeck sophistication: it is a more primitive, elemental sort, blended with folk overtones...
...Wind Ensemble reappeared with Robert Kurka's Suite from The Good Soldier Schweik. This basically tonal work, composed in 1956, treads perilously close to eclecticism as it attempts to combine all the classic styles of twentieth century music: the playful dissonance of Prokofieff, the biting sarcasm of Mahler, a Milhaud-like use of jazz, and insistent rhythms at once reminiscent of Igor Stravinsky and Leonard Bernstein. Combined with the nearly contemporary Town Piper Music of Richard Mohaupt (for the full Band) the work gave the second half of the program a decidedly Broadway cast. In both works Walker...
...conductor, of course, is only as good as the members of his-orchestra, and to give complete credit one would have to name nearly every individual performer. It was an evening of soloists, especially in the much reduced ensembles of the Stravinsky and Milhaud. Violinist Tison Street and flutist Geoffrey Greenfield were outstanding in the Stranvinsky. The jazz-like Creation featured sensitive solos from 'cellist Philip Moss and saxophonist Hardin Matthews, as well as some sultry low-register flutter-tonguing by the two flutists. Oboists George Donner's Gershwin-like plaints creation actually predates Rhapsody in Blue and American...
...spite of all this, the evening was far from an overwhelming triumph. The Haydn and the Milhaud suffered from problems of balance; the brass and the percussion were the respective offenders. Intonation in the Haydn was poor. Accompaniment figures in the violas were almost polytonal, and in spite of stalwarts like Street, Lisa Sandow and Richard Hamm, the strings evinced the same raw amateur sound that has plagued the Bach Society for years. Only in the humor of the finale's coda did the work manage to come alive...
...could not help but noitice an element of vulgarity in Adams's treatment of the music. Both the Haydn and the Mozart lacked the classical elegance that is so important in works of that period. In the Milhaud Adams adopted a grinding, spread-kneed approach and a style of rhythmic emphasis that owed more to Motown than nineteen-twenties jazz...