Milhaud - La Creation Du Monde
The beautiful opening is so sad, it has an odd similarity with the Introduction to the St Matthew Passion. The piece is known well by saxophonists due to the replacement of the viola with alto sax. Although beautiful, the opening doesn't quite seem to convey the grandeur of the subject, the forces of the ensemble simply can't muster enough breadth and depth to express the subject adequately, but then perhaps nothing could. The early jazz lines that follow in the Fugue sound kitsch to modern ears, but there is interesting bitonal dissonance aplenty. The piano's plodding lines sound like they should be hammered out on a battered old honkytonk with broken keys, anything else sounds simply too polished. And perhaps polish is the work's Achilles heel, viz. the refinement of classical playing is stylistically opposed to the more variable and organic phrasing of jazz idioms. I hesitate to discard a piece with such beautiful moments into musical-no-man's-land, but it's hard to conceive how this piece can be performed without sounding either twee or clumsy. The Scherzo allows the percussion to have some interesting moments, before the Final connives an unhappy arranged marriage between the opening material and the jazz licks. Milhaud sometimes feels like a composer who had slightly too many interests and desperately strove to reconcile them in his music. At times he is successful, and we are pleased to have a substantial work with a saxophone part... At times we wonder whether we just need more music to be written.