Milhaud: Le Boeuf sur le Toit

Earlier this week I was listening to a recording of Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faun. It was vinyl pressing of a 1950s performance featuring the Detroit Symphony Orchestra led by Paul Paray. The LP side was completed by a recording of Darius Milhaud's Le Boeuf sur le Toit, op. 58 (1919), with the London SO conducted by Antal Dorati. And so we carried on with the Frenchman's exotic, rumbustious pastiche that emerged from a 1917 visit to Brazil. Originally conceived as a fantasia to accompany a Chaplinesque movie, it was soon picked up by Jean Cocteau and turned into a ballet. The music is conceived as a (cinematic) sequence of popular Brazilian tunes interspersed with a rondo-like theme. Milhaud never disclosed the origin of these tunes, referring to them nonchalantly as "a few popular melodies, tangos, maxixes, sambas, even a Portuguese fado" but the assiduous detective work performed by Daniella Thompson and others has revealed that the 28 tunes go back to at least 14 Brazilian composers, some of which were very popular at the time when Milhaud visited the country. Here is an analysis of the piece with reference to all the tunes featured. It is now assumed that only the motto theme was truly Milhaud's. The question to what extent this is a case of ice cold plagiarism continues to be vigorously debated. However, the imbroglio shouldn't spoil our pleasure of listening to this delightful piece.

The two versions I listened to - the aforementioned LP with LSO/Dorati and a CD recording with the Ulster Orchestra, led by Yan Pascal Tortelier - made for two very different experiences. Tortelier's reading is brisk and uniformily loud, turning the tropical fantasia in some sort of orchestral showpiece. Compared to the LP the CD sounds predictably more glossy and cold too. Dorati's take on the Boeuf is slower, taking 3 minutes longer (19' as opposed to Tortelier's 16') and is imbued with a sort of nobility that is wholly absent in the more brash and virtuosic rendering by Tortelier and his Irish orchestra. With Dorati we move more casually through a diversified musical landscape. There is time to breath, to admire the sights and colours that cinematographically bloom and fade before our mind's eye. Dorati's reading draws our attention to the fact that this accessible music, that seems to saunter along quite nonchalantly, must be hard to conduct well.
Whilst the LP still is in need of a KM treatment, it already sounds more three-dimensional and engaging than the CD.

It's remarkable how very rarely this quite accessible and exuberant music is recorded nowadays. Tortelier's is as far as I am aware the only contemporary reading and even that goes back to 1991.  Ridiculous how today's young maestros continue to churn out alpine symphonies, heldenlebens, Mahler 9ths and Shostakovich 10ths, whilst disregarding a wealth of clever and engaging repertoire.