Classical Music | Music for Quintet

Recorded on 04/18/2012, uploaded on 11/27/2012

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Though it may sound quaint and antique, La cheminée du roi René is a score that owes its existence to the resourcefulness and inexhaustible imagination of a modern composer. Darius Milhaud grew up in Aix-en-Provence, the location of the castle and court of René I, a medieval count whose code of chivalry and fantastic sporting tournaments fascinated the French composer. Milhaud originally contributed this music to the score of a 1939 film and later adapted it into a suite that has become one of the most important pieces in the wind quintet repertoire. Alongside Francis Poulenc, who also made significant additions to the wind repertoire, Milhaud is certainly one of the most famous of the group of composers known as “Les Six.”

Milhaud unites the five disparate voices of the wind quintet in combinations that still sound fresh and unusual today. His use of bitonality, or music happening in two keys simultaneously, contributes to the off-kilter and surprising harmonies that accompany melodies that are ornamented with old-fashioned “medieval” flourishes.  The suite ends up sounding rather cinematic in the way the scene keeps changing. The movements are short, so in quick succession, we watch a feisty troupe of jugglers, then a languid courtly dance in triple-meter (“La Maousinglade,” a sarabande), and then a tense joust on the river Arc.       City of Tomorrow

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.