I assume (without any evidence, admittedly) that murky manipulations of record-company marketing moguls must have been responsible for the fact that these two of Milhaud's most substantial and brilliantly scored works, originally recorded by Le Chant du Monde in association with the French Radio, have taken all but a quarter of a century to arrive here—and then, presumably only because 1992 was the centenary of the composer's birth This is the more indefensible in that the orchestral playing, under Milhaud himself, is outstandingly good—in every department, but with the violins noticeably as sure-footed as mountain goats at the vertiginous heights into which they are sent—and the recording quality though digitally remastered from analogue, is remarkably full and clear, with exemplary balance of the very large orchestra employed That for the Fourth Symphony is particularly huge and includes two saxophones, a ten-piece brass section (not counting the horns) and a large percussion group The work was written to mark the centenary of the 1848 Revolution and is unashamedly programmatic The first movement, which depicts the original insurrection, is predictably strident, with polytonally clashing simultaneous strands (like Ives); the second, a long dirge for those killed, is noteworthy for its many unusual instrumental effects (to mention only one, muted trombones in thirds in their bottom-most pedal register); the third, headed ''The peaceful joys of liberty rediscovered'', is by no means as peaceful as that suggests, but at one point (symbolically?) develops into a fugue against a background of non-related parts, the finale, a joyous commemoration ending with a percussion barrage, at moments is reminiscent of Walton.
Milhaud himself revealed that the idea for his Eighth Symphony, written a decade later for the inauguration of a new concert-hall in the University of California at Berkeley, was inspired by the example of Smetana's Vltava: its four movements again programmatic but still retaining the structure of the classical symphony, portray the river Rhone rising as a stream amid the mists, clouds and winds of the Alps (the movement, marked avec mystere et violence, is full of striking instrumental colorations), flowing serenely into Lake Geneva, rushing forth impetuously (in a boisterous, angular scherzo) to head for the Mediterranean, on its way forming Milhaud's beloved Camargue. Despite often conflicting tonalities a diatonic thread runs through the whole, finally emerging triumphantly on a massive chord of D. The sheer size of Milhaud's prodigious output (''I write as long as there is ink in my pen'', he once said) has hindered recognition of some of his most significant works, but this welcome disc is a step in the right direction.'