Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Milhaud: L'Orestie d'Eschyle

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Although I certainly would like to air them, I confess I have never broadcast any of the fifteen operas of Darius Milhaud (1892-1974). I simply have never run across any recordings of them. There has, however, come into my hands recently a recording of Milhaud's trilogy of oratorios, all three of them intensely dramatic in their treatment of the ancient Greek myths dealing with the murderous Orestes and the cursed House of Atreus. The old stories have been handed down to us as staged tragedies by the playwright Aeschylus.

Milhaud worked on his Oresteia trilogy over the period 1913-23, employing a French translation of the Greek text by the Catholic poet Paul Claudel. Milhaud's personal style of composition changed over the decade he labored on it. It begins where Schonberg's Gurrelieder leaves off in the late Romantic style, then transitions into a neoclassical mode more like his fellow Frenchman Poulenc or maybe Stravinsky in his Parisian days, then moves on to incorporate unsettling polytonality, lots of special percussion effects and even a Gallic form of Sprechstimme vocalization. (This latter part of the trilogy was actually staged years later as an opera directed by the composer's wife.)

The world premiere recording of the complete trilogy was issued courtesy of the Naxos label in 2014 on three compact discs. L'Orestie d'Eschyle requires a small army of singers and players: a symphony orchestra of Mahlerian size with enlarged percussion section, and four choruses, plus vocal soloists. Naxos gives us an American concert production of Milhaud's masterwork, originating at the University of Michigan and employing professional and semi-pro performers. The vocal soloists are all professionals. They are backed by the University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra, the Chamber Choir and University Choir of the Ann Arbor campus School of Music, the Orpheus Singers and UMS Choral Union. Kenneth Kieser marshals all these musical resources. Two reviewers for Fanfare magazine were impressed with the Naxos release. That tough cookie of a reviewer, Lynn Rene Bayley (amazingly) wrote, "This will surely be one of the outstanding operatic recordings of our time" (Fanfare, Mar/Apr, 2015 issue).