Underrated Classical Music: Milhaud's Petites Symphonies

 Darius Milhaud wrote so much that he did his posthumous reputation serious damage simply by writing too much music that was too good. There is no way to cover him in one post because there is so much that's magnificent. Here is an artist who wrote something like 2500 compositions in every possible genre and form, was amenable to incorporating every possible new development in modern and popular music + every development in modern art and literature, was a sterling human being who seemed to have infinite time and patience to devote to his students, and all while suffering from debilitating arthritis that confined him to a wheelchair for the last 25 years of his life. And yet he's rarely ever played. Why? Because too much of his music is too good, and nobody knows where to start. Mahler's symphonies may be over an hour long, but there are only ten of them plus a few song cycles and a cantata, it's pretty easy to cull through the whole thing. But like Villa-Lobos, to figure out how to best champion Milhaud takes literally months of listening.

So I guess the place to start is with the Petites Symphonies - or Chamber Symphonies. Symphonies that take five minutes and require only a few instruments each; every one of them three movements and every movement little more than a minute long. In the socially distanced era, is there any better music to play? It's cliché to talk this way, but every one of them is a perfectly cut diamond (as Stravinsky said of Webern), not a wasted note (a cliché even more commonly used), and each is over just as you're warmed up. They're like amuse bouches or apéritifs, each just long enough to whet your appetite for more pieces of music - thousands of which can be provided by Milhaud. Stravinsky's experiments in bitonality and polyrhythm and folk song are put through a particle accelerator, then added are elements of jazz, bossa-nova, cabaret, French chanson, and Mussorgsky. Just listen. It's not like any other music on earth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yiRh8I1R_U