A suite from Saudades do Brasil, Op.67b

Overture

Sorocaba

Botafago

Ipanema

Corcovado

Tijuca

Sumaré

Paineras

Paysandú

The two years that Milhaud spent in Brazil - as secretary to the poet Paul Claudel, then French Ambassador in Rio de Janeiro - was an experience he was never to forget. As an impressionable young man in his mid-twenties, he “fell deeply in love” with the country and, as a composer open to new sounds and ideas, he was fascinated by the popular music he heard there. He was particularly intrigued by a special quality in the rhythms of the songs and dances performed at Carnival time. “So,” he recalled, “I bought a lot of maxixes and tangos and tried to play them with their syncopated rhythms… At last my efforts were rewarded and I could both play and analyze this typically Brazilian subtlety.”

Milhaud’s acquisition of a popular style, which was soon to be supplemented by a similarly detailed study of jazz, was timely. Two years after this return to Paris in 1918, his ears “still full of the subtle rhythms of the tango,” he was caught up in a group of young composers memorably identified by a journalist as “Les Six.” Very different though they were, they all subscribed to some extent to the aesthetic of Jean Cocteau who deplored “the kind of music you listen to with your head in yours hands” and argued for music inspired by the everyday - street fairs, circuses, the musical hall. Milhaud’s first celebration of Brazilian popular music, Le boeuf sur le toit, which Cocteau adopted as a brilliantly successful ballet, coincided exactly with the mood of the time. So did his next work in that line, the Saudades do Brasil (Memories of Brazil) which, written originally for piano in 1921, derives directly from his study of maxixes and tangos in Rio de Janeiro.

The orchestral version of Saudades do Brasil consists of the twelve short movements of the piano original, each named after a district in Rio, and a newly written Overture clearly inspired by the street musicians of the city. Of the eight movements that follow on this occasion, Sorocaba is a particularly entertaining example of the bitonal harmonic technique much favoured by the composer at the time - though not by the Brazilian musicians who had aroused Milhaud’s enthusiasm in the first place and who might well have regarded his use of more than one key at once as crudely incompetent. As Botafogo goes on to demonstrate, however, the combination of an accompaniment in one key and a melody in another is certainly dissonant but by no means artless and by no means unappealing. Indeed, given that all the pieces are in much the sam sort of rhythm, and not very different melodically either, Milhaud’s sometimes poetic, sometimes nostalgic and sometimes rowdy harmonies are the major source of the fascination unfailingly exercised by the work.