Born into a Jewish family living in Aix-en-Provence, Darius Milhaud studied under Dukas, Gédalge and Widor at the Paris Conservatoire, originally as a violinist, before turning to composition.

He was close friends with many contemporary painters and writers including the diplomat-poet Paul Claudel, whom he accompanied to Brazil as secretary, after Claudel's appointment as Minister at the French delegation in Rio de Janeiro.

On his return to Paris in 1918, Milhaud founded (with Honegger, Auric, Tailleferre, Durey and Poulenc ) the movement of the diverse group of French composers known as Les Six, under the protection of Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie.

Milhaud spent the years of the Second World War teaching in the United States.

He returned to a similar post at the Paris Conservatoire after 1947.

One of France’s most prolific composers of almost every genre, Milhaud published more than 400 compositions, usually using advanced techniques, especially polytonality.

Milhaud wrote a considerable amount of music for the theatre, operas, ballets and incidental music, as well as film and radio scores.

Collaboration with Claudel brought the opera Christophe Colombe and a number of compositions of incidental music for plays ranging from those of Shakespeare to the work of contemporaries such as Brecht, Supervielle, Giraudoux and Anouilh.

He composed the ballets Le Boeuf sur le Toit (The Ox on the Roof) and La Crèation du Monde, after hearing black jazz in Harlem; these represent only a small fraction of his dramatic work.

Milhaud was equally prolific as a composer of orchestral music of all kinds, including twelve symphonies and a variety of concertos, some of which reflect the influence of his native Provence.

He contributed widely to the repertoire of French song both in choral settings and in songs for solo voice and piano, with texts chosen from a great variety of sources from Rabindranath Tagore and Andrè Gide to the words of Pope John XXIII, the last in a choral symphony Pacem in terris.

In addition to eighteen string quartets and useful additions to duo sonata repertoire, not least for viola, an instrument used for the Quatre Visages of 1943, Milhaud provided the charming suite La Cheminèe du Roi Renè for wind quintet and the attractive Pastorale (1935) for oboe, clarinet and bassoon.

He shows here, as elsewhere, a characteristically French adroitness in writing for woodwind instruments.

Two works in particular have proved attractive additions to repertoire; the first, Saudades do Brasil, a suite for piano, is based on music heard in Brazil during the composer's stay there between 1916 and 1918.

Scaramouche, arranged for two pianos from incidental music for Molière's Le Mèdecin Volant, is a lively jeu d'esprit, in the spirit of the commedia dell'arte character of the title.