MILHAUD AND FALLA
As part of the tenth anniversary of Young Sinfonia, ¡VAMOS! Festival and The Sage Gateshead were very pleased to present an afternoon programme of classical music performed by the talented young musicians. This took place on the last day of the 2006 festival.
Below is some information about the composers who's work was performed:
Milhaud, Marius
Le Boeuf sur le Toit
b Marseilles, 4 Sept 1892; d Geneva, 22 June 1974
Composer of numerous operas, ballets, other dramatic works, major orchestral works, choral works, solo vocal music, songs, chamber music, solo instrumental music, children’s works, electro-acoustic music and numerous arrangements. He was a prominent member of ‘les six’, a group of French composers famous for their light-touch and ironic playful style, indebted to Satie; the group was also known as ‘Les nouveaux jeunes’.
Milhaud’s work is characterized by a fascination for light and fragmentary textures, simple harmonic passages which are deliberately ‘blurred’ and witty distortions of classical and baroque forms. He was also a real lover of popular musics and
Le Boeuf sur le Toit, written in 1919 to a scenario by Jean Cocteau, is testament to this. The main musical inspiration comes from Milhaud’s stay in Brazil with the French ambassador, where he encountered musics the like of which he had never heard before and fell in, love with its culture. This ‘ballet for orchestra’ contains Brazilian popular melodies, tangos, maxixes, sambas, and a Portuguese fado.
Manuel de Falla
Nights in the Gardens of Spain (‘Noches en los jardines de España’)
b Cádiz, 23 Nov 1876; d Alta Gracia, Argentina, 14 Nov 1946
A composer of numerous ballets, symphonic poems and other forms, De Falla is perhaps best known for his subtle and malleable orchestral textures, his fascination for Spanish traditional musics and his elaboration of neoclassical techniques. Noches en los jardines de España, 1909–15 (first prfoemed in Paris in 1922) is in three movements:
1 En el Generalife (in the gardens of the old Moorish palace that overlooks Granada)
2 Danza lejana
3 En los jardines de la Sierra de Córdoba (in the gardens of the hills of Córdoba)
The piece, like many of de Falla’s from this period, is evocative of an idealised, romanticised Spain, and draws on traditional Spanish musics, especially (but not exclusively) on flamenco rhythms and pitch structures.