1. Overture           
2. Chaos before Creation            
3. The slowly lifting darkness, the creation of trees, plants, insects, birds and beasts     
4. Man and woman created           
5. The desire of man and woman          
6. The man and woman kiss

From the end of World War I, American popular musicians, many of them African-American, had begun to win acclaim in allied capitals, above all in progressively-minded Paris. Fewer Europeans experienced American jazz at its source but Darius Milhaud was one. Touring America in 1922, he frequented nightclubs and ‘speakeasies’ (illicit clubs where alcohol was dispensed during the Prohibition years) when, as he recalled in his memoirs, ‘Harlem had not yet been discovered by the snobs and aesthetes: we [Milhaud and the singer Yvonne George] were the only white folk there’. Milhaud’s ballet La création du monde was composed on his return to a pseudo-African scenario by the surrealist Blaise Cendrars with designs by Fernand Léger. The prelude, despite its jazz band scoring, is serenely Bachian in tone, the main body of the work, in which a seething mass of weirdly costumed dancers represents the primal soup from which life gradually erupts, is a sort of jazz fugue.

_{Note by David Gutman}

Darius Milhaud
^1892–1974

Darius Milhaud was a French-Jewish composer and teacher, who studied in Paris under Charles Widor and Vincent d'Indy and was a member of the famed group of composers Les Six, which included Satie and Poulenc.

Having discovered jazz on his trip to the US in 1922 (the inspiration behind today's programme), Milhaud later emigrated to America in 1940, where he secured a teaching post in Oakland, California. From 1947 to 1971 he taught alternate years in California and the Paris Conservatoire, until poor health caused him to retire. Milhaud passed away not long after, in Geneva, Switzerland.

'I thought, what a wonderful time now to rediscover the music of the greatest African American composer'
^{Sir Simon Rattle}

Sinfonia No 4 was commissioned by a consortium of American orchestras and received its premiere by the New Jersey Symphony in March 2012. It is a concise work in one movement, Walker himself describing its as 'complex, intense and compact', going on to say that he wanted to compose a work that 'was more than an overture or extended fanfare'. Its title 'Strands' refers to the interplay of several melodic elements that are woven together, in themes that are full of drama, suspense and energy, and moments of release in phrases taken from the spirituals There is a Balm in Gilead and the affirming Roll, Jordan, Roll. This quote is repeated in the piano and is combined with a similarly stated rising bass line played by trombones and tuba.

George Walker
^1922–2018

Born in Washington, George Walker began to study piano at the age of five. His groundbreaking career took off as a young piano virtuoso when he was admitted to Oberlin College on a scholarship following his first public recital at the age of 14. Graduating with the highest honors in his class, he was admitted to the Curtis Institute of Music, and became the first black graduate to receive Artist Diplomas in both piano and composition. Later that year, he made his New York Town Hall debut and appeared as soloist in Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No 3 with the Philadelphia Orchestra. After further study in France in 1947, hespent several years as a touring virtuoso in Europe and America. Walker later returned to France to study composition with Nadia Boulanger 

In later life, one of Walker's many honours included winning the Pulitzer Prize for Composition in 1996, the first African-American to do so. Over 20 years of composing and educating later, this great American composer died at the age of 96.

1. Allegro ma non troppo (Pleasant, cheerful feelings awakened on arrival in the countryside)
2. Andante molto moto (Scene by the brook)
3. Allegro (Merry gathering of country folk)
4. Allegro (Thunder Storm)
5. Allegretto (Shepherd’s song: benevolent feelings, combined with thanks to the deity, after the storm)

Beethoven loved nature and the open air. He spent most of his summers away from Vienna in the country retreats of Heiligenstadt, Mödling and Baden, where he would walk the woods and fields notebook in hand. ‘No one can love the countryside as much as I do,’ he once said, ‘for surely woods, trees and rocks produce the echo which man desires to hear.’

But nature was not just a balm for the senses; for Beethoven it was evidence of the Creator’s hand. Raised on the tolerant attitudes of the Enlightenment, he had little interest in conventional formal religion, and it was in the outdoors, amidst the wonders of the natural world, that he found himself closest to God. He was hardly alone in that – such feelings were part of the spirit of the early Romantic age – but it was perhaps his unique placing at the threshold of the Classical and Romantic eras in music that allowed such a work as the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony to achieve greatness.

‘More an expression of feeling than painting’, said Beethoven, and it is true that, while the atmosphere of the countryside pervades every bar, the Sixth Symphony can be fully enjoyed without resorting to mental pictures of shepherds, peasants and cuckoos.

^{An excerpt from notes by Lindsay Kemp}

Ludwig van Beethoven
^{(1770–1827)}

In his early twenties Beethoven left his native Bonn for Vienna, where he became established as a composer, piano virtuoso and improviser of great ability. Largely following the Classical models of Haydn and Mozart in his 'early' period, he recognised signs of his impending deafness as early as 1796.

In 1802, he revealed his suffering and alienation, his thoughts of suicide and his creative resolve in his Heiligenstadt Testament. His 'middle' period was characterised by a broadening of form and an extension of harmony to suit his proto-Romantic expression, spawning the Symphonies Nos 2 to 8, notable piano sonatas, several string quartets and his only opera, Fidelio.

He produced less music in his ‘late’ period (from 1813) but his last years saw his mould-breaking ‘Choral’ Symphony and an exploration of increasing profundity in the more intimate mediums of the string quartet and piano sonata.