I know Christopher Columbus is anathema these days, but I can’t help but buy music inspired by him whenever I can find it on the cheap. Pictured are two recordings I acquired recently from Princeton Record Exchange. Both works are by members of Les Six, that loose collective of composers, brought together by Jean Cocteau, that flourished in Paris in the late ‘teens and 1920s.
The Milhaud is the more idiomatic and musically satisfying of the two, with an all-French cast, captured at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. The conductor is Manuel Rosenthal, a composer himself (and a Ravel pupil), best known for his arrangements of Offenbach for the ballet “Gaîté Parisienne.” Unfortunately, the sound is also idiomatic – which is to say, mid-1950s French, complete with tinny cymbal crashes and fillings-rattling climaxes. It‘s a live performance, as opposed to a studio recording.
The Honegger is a recorded premiere, a recreation of a radio drama in state-of-the-art digital sound. However, it’s delivered by actors in a manner and acoustic that suggest a theatrical performance. (It was actually recorded in a church.) Furthermore, the dialogue is in English.
Toward the beginning, someone shows up just long enough to do their best John Cleese-style impression of a Frenchman. Puzzlingly, for the remainder of the performance, all the Italian and Spanish parts are spoken in unaccented English. Well, unaccented in Italian and Spanish, anyway. The principals are all divided as to whether they should emulate English stage-speak or American high school drama club. Columbus himself sounds like a good approximation of 1940s Warner Bros.’ supercilious screen-villain Henry Daniell.
I wish the release had included as a bonus an isolated presentation of the music, without the spoken dialogue, since, unlike the historic Columbus, the actors are in imminent peril of dropping off a flat earth into the chasm of parody. The first few minutes, when it’s just the narrator, before the actual dramatization begins, is especially agonizing.
Be that as it may, I’m pleased to be able to add them both to my collection of Columbiana. There’s a surprising amount of it, composed by the likes of Leonardo Balada, Gaetano Donizetti, Manuel de Falla, Alberto Franchetti, Philip Glass, Victor Herbert, Richard Wagner, William Walton, and Kurt Weill, among others.
Fingers crossed that I can still get away with posting about it on Columbus Day, if only because of my Italian surname.
Selections from Rosenthal’s 1956 recording of Milhaud’s “Christophe Colomb” (1930)
A staging of the complete opera in a 1993 production
Arthur Honegger’s radio play “Christophe Colomb” (1940)
PHOTO: Honegger and Milhaud, flanking mentor Jean Cocteau
