Given the conspicuous success of Milhaud’s first essay in this form (written in 1939 for the Chicago SO’s Golden Jubilee the following year), it seems in hindsight more than a touch surprising that five years were to pass before the Koussevitzky Foundation commissioned its no-less-appealing successor. The Second Symphony was completed in the autumn of 1944, and Milhaud himself directed the Boston premiere in 1946. Bearing a dedication to the memory of Serge Koussevitzky’s first wife, Natalie, it is a five-movement work of haunting serenity and poignancy, full of the most piquant harmonic and instrumental resource, and whose centrepiece and emotional core comprises a processional (marked Douloureux) of rare elevation and grave beauty (I hear strong parallels with some of Alan Rawsthorne’s similarly restrained and elegiac slow movements). Alun Francis and the Basle RSO lend stylish advocacy to this rewarding score, without necessarily supplanting in my affections Michel Plasson’s rival Toulouse account; indeed, it’s the latter which continues to offer the more deeply felt, eloquent experience (and the DG engineering yields a greater body of tone and more judicious balance than that masterminded by Francis’s Swiss Radio production crew).
Anyway, Milhaud enthusiasts will want this new CPO disc (the final instalment in Francis’s invaluable Milhaud symphony cycle) for the companion work here, the impressive (and, at present, otherwise unavailable) Third Symphony of 1946. It was the then-director of Radio Francais, Henri Barraud, who requested from Milhaud a Te Deum to celebrate the conclusion of the war. In the event, the commission grew into a 27-minute symphony, the last of whose four movements incorporates a setting of the Te Deum full of bold invention and pagan exuberance. The chorus also makes a wordless contribution to the remarkable second movement, a genuinely striking essay which distils an awesome, hieratic mystery. Rather less compelling, perhaps, are the first and third movements (grimly jovial and playfully rustic respectively), but overall Milhaud’s Third is a work which rises in my estimation every time I return to it – no hardship in a performance as alert and dedicated as Francis’s. An enterprising coupling as well as a fitting culmination to a bold recording venture.'