Trim Symphony

Chicago music lovers got a treat last week: the first U.S. performance of Symphony No. 7 by Darius Milhaud (pronounced me-lo). Performed with clarity and spirit by Conductor Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony, it turned out to be one of Milhaud's most appealing works.

On first hearing, the Seventh is not a work to seize its listeners by the ears or by viscera either. Instead, it sounds neat, trim and attractive, with an overall flavor bland enough to permit the savoring of delicate, sonic side dishes. The first movement is sunny and almost muscular, the slow movement an exurbanite pastoral, whose plaintive tune (in solo strings and winds) is accompanied by brassy grunts and then by vague and charming counter-tunes. This movement also contains an enigmatic episode: a sudden passage of smashing violence, gone as suddenly as it came. The finale is in jocose, carnival spirit, but a carnival whose details are as vaporous as a dream, only solidifying as the music nears its end.

The Chicago audience, a generally conservative one, did not demonstrably go for the Milhaud work; in fact, most of them did not go to hear it, but got it as a bonus with the star attraction, Jascha Heifetz and the Brahms Violin Concerto. But, in time to come, Milhaud's piece should win hearers on its own merit.

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