March 19, 2013

  • Review: More Music for the Ballets Russe

     

    Diaghilev – Ballets Russes, Volume 9
    Sauget: La chatte; Milhaud: Le train bleu; Scarlatti-Tommasini: Les femmes de bonne humeur
    Deutsche Radio Philharmonic Saarbrucken Kaiserslautern/Robert Reimer
    Hanssler Classic 93.296
    Total Time:  74:01
    Recording:   ****/****
    Performance: ****/****

    The last few years, Hannsler Classic’s Dhiagelev series has brought to light a number of works commissioned for the Ballets Russe that have long been ignored.  Many of the more familiar works have not been reviewed here, but it is worth noting that each release in the series has been quite good.  The present release presents three works of interest for fans of Les Six and the music of the 1920s and demonstrates how the company had moved more closely to being a seedbed promoting the avant-garde.   The Milhaud and Sauget have appeared before, most recently in a re-issue conducted by Igor Markevitch.  This new release will certainly supercede that one in many ways.

    The first work on the release is by the slightly better known Darius Milhaud.  Milhaud’s jazzier musical rhythms and often more neo-classical style often appeals to a wide audience to this day.  The 1924 ballet Le train bleu takes its title from the popular luxury train used by elite society to travel from Paris to the Cote d’Azur, though no train actually appears in the scenario itself.  The names involved in this production are a who’s who of the period with Cocteau providing the story’s genesis, Nijinky’s sister serving as choreographer, stage sets by Henri Laurens, and even ‘Coco’ Chanel providing costumes from her new swimwear line.  Even a copy of a picture by Picasso served as a curtain image.  The music for the ballet though finds Milhaud eschewing the music he had become known for by that point (namely South American and jazz influences) and instead turning to 19th-century operetta, and specifically Offenbach, for a work that might be considered filled with irony and nose-thumbing at the audiences that had applauded Milhaud’s ability to shock the conservative music establishment.  Certainly Milhaud took great delight in the “surprising” 19th-century introduction to this ballet.  Perhaps the audience even turned to their program to double check that this was a Milhaud piece.  Of course, even within this “older”, almost Tchaikovsky-like ballet, there is a tremendous amount of wit especially in the way Milhaud moves harmonically and within the many rhythmic syncopations and off-rhythms he creates in the score.  One feels that this piece seems to have one foot in both centuries with often rather amusing results.  Listening to the work, one gets a sense for Milhaud’s playfulness as even his orchestral gestures are modeled after the way strings, winds, and then brass (horns mainly) are “supposed” to present material.  And often the material they have to play is rather innocuous.  Though this is not earth-shattering music by any means, it is a welcome addition to Milhaud’s recorded catalog

    Most readers will be somewhat aware of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella which explored the music of Pergolesi, though essentially through Stravinsky’s own musical lens.  Dhiagelev was not pleased with Stravinsky’s piece because he expected something along the lines of the middle piece on this program, Les femmes de bonne humeur (1917).  Though the music of Vincenzo Tommasini is relatively unknown today, his adaptation of several Scarlatti sonatas for this ballet had a fairly good concert life in the five-movement suite form that appears here.  Toscanini often performed this suite in concert and this is one of its rarer modern recordings.  The piece is a bit of Neo-Classical/Baroque writing for modern orchestra, with harpsichord, with subtle moments and occasional romantic-flavored harmony.  At best a diversion, it does have a few moments where Tommasini’s ability as an orchestrator who also has some humor.  The shifts between an older style and a hint of modernism are what lend the work a bit of charm today.

    Henri Sauget (1892-1974) was sometimes thought of as a seventh member of Les Six.  Le chatte was commissioned in 1927and is thus one of the later works for the Ballets Russe; a period that finds the company’s more “infamous composer”, Stravinsky, already shifting from modernism to neo-classicism stylistically.  The piece was choreographed by a young George Balanchine and is one of the works exemplifying the later period of the company.  The piece was included on a tour of Germany where a rather amusing review by Theodor Adorno that found the music trite and anything but radical among other issues.  Sauget’s style here results in a more thickly-scored piece at times that feels like late 19th-century romanticism with slight touches of modernism.  The string writing sometimes feels like it might be more appropriate to a theater orchestra production (along the lines of say Victor Herbert).  The writing tends to feature a lot of unisonal writing with rather simple cells of themes being tossed about the orchestra often coming back to full orchestra cadences that are distant cousins of Poulenc’s style for the period.  The piece tends to shine most in its more intimate moments with delicate solo lines and interesting wind writing with added trumpet solos.  The different sections of the ballet feel less connected than in the other works tending to be shaped within the confines of each section.  It is an interesting work but perhaps not the best work in Sauget’s oeuvre—though one might say that of each of these ballet pieces on the present release.    

    The performances here are in keeping with the standards of the series so far.  Robert Reimer seems to have a good grasp of the wit and stylistic adjustments needing to be made across the three works and the orchestra responds well to his direction.  There are a couple of slight brass issues in the Milhaud (movement 7), and the strings just seem a bit thin in the Tommasini. These are slight anomalies  in an otherwise fine set of performances of rare works and does not distract from the humor of the work.