Around the World: Trios for Clarinet, Violin and Piano
Ensemble Next Parallel
Heritage Records HTGCD170 (heritage-records.com)
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One of my great pleasures this past summer was reading Ma vie heureuse (My Happy Life) by Darius Milhaud (1892-1974). I was quite surprised to discover that this prolific French composer, a member of Les Six, is sadly underrepresented in current commercial recordings and on websites like YouTube and Spotify. My own collection, built over the past half century, is thankfully more complete than what’s out there currently, so I was nonetheless able to revisit some of Milhaud’s wonderful compositions in conjunction with his delightful memoire. That being said, I was pleased to receive a new disc from clarinetist Yevgeny Dokshansky recently featuring Milhaud’s Suite for Clarinet, Violin, and Piano Op.157b (1936), comprising charming movements excepted from the music for a play by Jean Anouilh. Around the World: Trios for Clarinet, Violin and Piano performed by Ensemble Next Parallel (Heritage Records HTGCD170 heritage-records.com) also includes work by Milhaud’s contemporary, Armenian Aram Khachaturian, and living composers Peter Schickele (USA) and Roger J. Henry (Trinidad and Tobago). Khachaturian’s trio has a Romantic sensibility, and its final movement draws on an Uzbek folk melody. In Serenade for Three, Schickele is up to his usual tricks, particularly in the final movement’s perpetually rising variations on a theme from his alter ego PDQ Bach’s oratorio Oedipus Tex. Henry’s Caribbean infused music is actually not dissimilar to the sounds of Brazil that so inspired Milhaud most of a century earlier.
Yevgeny Dokshansky also included his earlier Heritage release featuring another of my mid-century favourite composers – From Jewish Life: The Music of Ernest Bloch – on which he is accompanied by pianist Richard Masters. Another welcome addition to my collection.
