Day 99
Milhaud String quartets no 14 and 15
Parisii quartet Manfred quartet
I know the famous Milhaud pieces but there a huge amount more to go at - his opus numbers go up to 443. There are 18 string quartets alone. Most famous among them are no 14 and 15 which are separate pieces but which can be played together as a string octet. I’ve been intrigued by what this/they might be like but I have never listened to them until now.
I quite enjoyed the first movement of the 14th quartet - it reminded me of early Tippett in its harmonic language and melodic shape though it doesn’t have Tippett’s rhythmic flare. But it was rather downhill from there - the more I listened the more it did seem rather like fairly aimless note spinning. The textures are quite clogged and although there is (perhaps mercifully) little of Michaud’s propensity for polytonality there is no real sense of harmonic roots. The 15th quartet had many of the same characteristics , including some very high lines for the first violin which got rather painful at time.
But of course the real interest is what the two quartets sound like played together as an octet. Pretty awful is the answer. if the textures in each separate quartet are clogged then putting the two together resulted in what was little more than an aural mess. It became quite painful at time. One had the mental image of eight players each struggling to be heard and holding on for dear life against seven colleagues who often seemed to be ploughing their own furrow
I had assumed that Milhaud would have used the contrasting quartets to create interesting textures and antiphonal effects but such moments are quite rare - there were perhaps some in the slow movement where Milhaud did seem to take advantage of the unusual format he had devised. But generally I couldn’t see that this was anything more than an interesting experiment than anything of real musical value. A review in Gramophone magazine described the piece as a ‘real stinker’: I’m inclined to agree with him.
So I doubt that I will be exploring any more Milhaud.Auric is the only one of Les Six left to complete the collection.
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