by Jarrett Hoffman

APOLLO’S FIRE & FOUR SEASONS — TODAY, AND WHENEVER YOU’D LIKE:

At 7:30 pm, Jeannette Sorrell and The Cleveland Baroque Orchestra head to St. Noel Church in Willoughby Hills to present the final performance of “Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Rediscovered,” a program that joins that work with the composer’s Concerto for Two Cellos and La Folia. Soloists include violinists Francisco Fullana (Le quattro stagioni), Alan Choo and Emi Tanabe (La Folia), and cellists René Schiffer and Sarah Stone. Tickets are available here.

If you want more Apollo’s Fire and more Four Seasons in your life, first of all, stay in Cleveland, which has plenty of both of those to offer (weather joke). And second of all, check out the ensemble’s most recent CD, released last week — Vivaldi: The Four Seasons, again featuring Francisco Fullana, and billed as “Not your mother’s Four Seasons.” Purchase here, and listen on Spotify here.

TODAY’S ALMANAC — MILHAUD & JAZZ IN 1920s PARIS:

In the 1920s, negrophilia — the term used among the French avant-garde to describe their fetishization of Black culture — was all the rage in Paris. That trend was also related to a longstanding interest in the “exotic,” as well as a post-WWI yearning for what was perceived as the “simple” or “primitive.” And the latter term, off-puttingly enough, was associated with jazz, which fascinated the public.

Among the many artists and composers influenced by those ideas was Darius Milhaud (above), who was part of a multi-disciplinary artistic group that particularly “took it upon itself to promote jazz as the badge of its own identity,” writes Bernard Gendron in his book Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde.

Those trends mentioned above are deeply problematic, as you probably don’t need me to tell you, and it’s important to consider Milhaud in that light. But in the eyes of many, the composer stood out in taking a more respectful approach to jazz than his contemporaries. One piece of evidence is his ballet La Création du Monde (premiered on this date in 1923 by the Ballets Suédois at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris), one of the most notable jazz-related works produced by members of that group of artists.

Milhaud was of course not alone in his desire to draw on popular culture for his own artistic creations — that was a common thread among many modernists. But according to Gendron, the composer went further than most “by viewing jazz not merely as cultural raw material for modernist experimentation or avant-garde shock tactics, but as an innovative art form in its own right…” [Read more…]