Milhaud and Poulenc, Without Equivocation

The two names among the group of iconoclastic, post-World War I French composers known as “Les Six” to retain a measure of currency are Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) and Darius Milhaud (1892-1974). Both, however, have equivocal reputations.

Poulenc has been critically slammed for being superficial, sentimental, vulgar--whether in his pointedly comic creations or his nominally serious ones. In truth, one doesn’t know where to draw or disentangle the emotional lines. Are those sentimental tunes serious? Are they sendups? Who cares?

Milhaud’s ups and downs in critical and popular favor can be attributed to a different problem: the volume of his output, which makes it difficult to sort out the inspired from the merely functional.

The recent, modest centennial celebrations in Milhaud’s native France and adoptive United States, where he taught--at Mills College in Oakland--during the last two decades of his life, failed to explore previously overlooked material. They did, however, remind us through recordings of the inventiveness and vitality of his familiar works, helpfully collected in a program enlisting the composer as conductor and pianist (EMI 54604).

Included are what may have been an early (1932) recording of “La creation du monde,” that jazzy, bumping-grinding balletic retelling of the Adam and Eve story set in an African jungle, and the 1919 “Bouef sur le toit,” a madhouse dance burlesque to a scenario by Jean Cocteau, impregnated with the samba rhythms of Brazil, where Milhaud served in a diplomatic post during World War I.

There are also his orchestrations of “Saudades do Brasil” (Souvenirs of Brazil, 1921), the 1936 “Suite Provencale” and a rollicking return to the tropics (in 1937) with the delectable two-piano “Scaramouche,” in which he is joined by Marcelle Meyer.

The music is pure delight, the performances richly atmospheric, whether in the bluesy cacophony of the ultra-French-sounding ensemble of soloists in “Creation”--among whom the spirit readily takes precedence over the letter of the score--or in the virtuosity of the spiffy bunch of Los Angeles musicians masquerading in the Suite and “Saudades” as the “Concerts Arts Orchestra,” taped in 1956, when classical recording actually took place in the Capitol Tower on Vine Street.

The piano originals of the gorgeously languorous “Saudades” appear on recordings for the first time in ages via flawlessly idiomatic performances by Brazilian pianist Antonio Barbosa, coupled with the second book of Debussy’s “Preludes” (Connoisseur Society 4190).

Poulenc’s music for two pianos has been getting a good ride lately. The carping of the dullards aside, it is a superb little body of music: an hour’s worth of lyrical, sentimental, rudely satirical, flashily energetic, always readily accessible material.

Two competing editions of the complete oeuvre appear on enterprising European labels.

Sweden brings us pianists Roland Pontinen and Love Derwinger with, in the Concerto, Osmo Vansnka leading the Malmo Symphony (BIS 593). On the British Olympia label (364) the pianists are Ingryd Thorson and Julian Barber, with Frans Rasmussen conducting the Aarhus (Denmark) Symphony in the concerto.

Both sets satisfy the needs of the Poulenc style, its alternations of pop friskiness and soulful balladry in the 1932 Concerto and the darker, modernist harmonies of the 1952 Sonata, to mention only the two largest works.

The BIS duo brings greater coloristic variety and, in general, a more Romantic approach to the material, abetted by spacious recorded sonics. Thorson and Thurber are more taken with the cool, Stravinsky-like rhythmic incisiveness also inherent in the scores, and they are accorded a fittingly close-up, taut acoustic.

Either way, Poulenc’s elegant wit and more somber asides are devotedly communicated by these skillful artists.*