Milhaud: La Création du Monde, Op. 81

Chronologically, this programme of music for wind ensemble is framed by Darius Milhaud’s La création du monde, a ballet score from 1923, and the composer Anders Emilsson’s Salute the band, commissioned for the 2006 centenary of the Swedish Wind Ensemble.

Simon Rattle as a man of experiment and discovery: back in the 1980s the now head of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra explored the territory connecting jazz with classical music – accompanied by well-known names like George Gershwin or Leonard Bernstein, and also less well-known ones such as Darius Milhaud. Today, Rattle's Jazz Album is among the highlights of his discography.

Darius Milhaud was a chameleon composer, imbibing the infectious rhythms of South America in Le Boeuf sur le toit and Scaramouche, and the sentiment of jazz in La Création du monde, together with a darker side in the Sonnets composé en secret with words written by the imprisoned French Resistance poet Jean Cassou.

Every epoch has had its group dances, and they have always been a source of inspiration to composers. In the interwar period, the Blues and Charleston meant as much to composers as the Sarabande and Gigue did to Johann Sebastian Bach and the Polonaise and Mazurka to Frédéric Chopin. The advent of American jazz and dance music in Europe was a gift from the gods for young composers hungry to find new paths and means of expression. Even though the word jazz meant little more than syncopated march and dance music based on ragtime, there was no stopping the rage. Jazz represented a radical break with the traditional, oldfashioned way of life of the nineteenth century, and made a wonderful match with the elated expectations that had replaced wartime suffering. Within just a few years, jazz fever swept across Europe. This CD bears witness.

Remastered from the original analogue tapes

In 1922 F. Scott Fitzgerald, the American author whose most celebrated novel is The Great Gatsby, published a collection of short stories under the title Tales of the Jazz Age. The Great War was over and, despite political turmoil, brutal racial repression and Prohibition – the “Noble Experiment” that theoretically banned alcohol throughout the United States from 1920 until 1933, Americans managed to throw caution to the winds and enjoy themselves until the Great Depression struck in 1929. “The jazz age” is now taken to refer to this “anything goes” period, during which jazz flourished and many new popular dance crazes popped up and were frequently displaced equally suddenly. The Charleston and the Fox Trot have endured, but others included such animal inspirations as the Kangaroo Hop, Grizzly Bear, Bunny Hug and Horse Trot.

This disc contains a number of “first recordings” which will no doubt fascinate and entertain the listener and are sure to attract critical interest.

With CDs approaching forty in number and a busy concert schedule stretching back more than a quarter of a century, the British piano duo Goldstone and Clemmow is firmly established as a leading force. Described by Gramophone as ‘a dazzling husband and wife team’, by International Record Review as ‘a British institution in the best sense of the word’, and by The Herald, Glasgow, as ‘the UK’s pre-eminent two-piano team’, internationally known artists Anthony Goldstone and Caroline Clemmow formed their duo in 1984 and married in 1989. Their extremely diverse activities in two-piano and piano-duet recitals and double concertos, taking in major festivals, have sent them all over the British Isles as well as to Europe, the Middle East and several times to the U.S.A., where they have received standing ovations and such press accolades as ‘revelations such as this are rare in the concert hall these days’ (Charleston Post and Courier). In their refreshingly presented concerts they mix famous masterpieces and fascinating rarities, which they frequently unearth themselves, into absorbing and hugely entertaining programmes; their numerous B.B.C. broadcasts have often included first hearings of unjustly neglected works,and their equally enterprising and acclaimed commercial recordings include many world premières.

The works featured on this new hybrid SACD, in which Mario Marzi is joined by the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi and conductor Hansjörg Schellenberger, represent some of the most significant pieces ever written for the saxophone.

Several of them, including the Jacques Ibert’s Concertino da Camera, and the two pieces by Milhaud, the arrangement of his work Scaramouche which was originally written for two pianos, and the ballet La Création du Monde are influenced by the music of the early jazz pioneers. Claude Debussy in the Rhapsody for Saxophone and Orchestra, and Alexander Glazunov’s in his concerto of 1934 are more interested in exploring the range of colour of the instrument within a more traditional framework.

For more than 20 years the saxophone player Mario Marzi has been working with the Teatro alla Scala and the Filarmonica della Scala under the baton of such leading conductors as Ricardo Muti, Carlo Maria Giulini, and Wolfgang Sawallisch. During this period he has won nine national and four international competitions.