One of the most prolific composers of the 20th century, Darius Milhaud (1892-1974) first gained prominence as a member of Les Six and made a career far outshining that paltry moniker. With an opus list ending at 443, Milhaud managed to keep a smile affixed on nearly everything he wrote, and you can imagine his work went through many phases of smile. His time with Les Six was pretty dang early in his career, just beginning to pry himself off of Debussy's language and get his own grooves into motion - and for the Album des six, he offered one of his most enchanting works from this transitional period.
The mazurka is a Polish dance that was popularized by Chopin's many entries in the genre, and Milhaud's Mazurka brings a lot of whole tones to the table. The melody is doused in sultry swinging chromaticism, a much more languorous take on the usually stiffer mazurka rhythm. The bass line swoops freely, creating surprising shifts in character and tonality. Deep, yet deft, pedaling is required to make the piece really shine, and thankfully the different modes shift on a bar-by-bar basis. Small touches keep things lively after multiple plays, such as the right hand chord in bar 34 (six from the end), and I've always loved "super-resonance" lines, ones that indicate notes should be held across the barline, only to reveal that there's nothing there. I feel like this piece should be played all the time, but perhaps its leafiness accounts for its lost-in-the-shuffle status. Or maybe people just don't want to be upstaged by this performance, which just about nails it (and what more needs to be said?):
~PNK
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