SoNA 2023-24 Defying Expectations Program Notes

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SoNA

Symphony of Northwest Arkansas

Defying Expectations February 17, 2024 Walton Arts Center Paul Haas, conductor

Le Boeuf sur le toit (1919–20)

eventually amassing over 400 opus

Darius Milhaud

in the lot. Nor did composition absorb

b September 4, 1892 in Marseille, France

all of his time: from 1940 through 1971

d June 22, 1974 in Geneva, Switzerland

he trained a battalion of musicians at

numbers without a single unfinished piece

Oakland’s Mills College. Milhaud’s original impetus for his droll Provençal-turned-global-citizen Darius

Brazilian-infused Le Boeuf sur le toit was

Milhaud combined astounding prolificity

as background music for any of Charlie

with a richly eclectic imagination. He got

Chaplin’s silent films. What that odd

started before the First World War and

title—literally “the ox on the roof”—actually

kept up the pace well into the 1970s,

means is anybody’s guess. Milhaud


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