Piano Concerto No. 2, Op. 225

Piano Concerto No. 2, Op. 225, composed 1941 in California during the war years. Milhaud had left France in 1940 after the fall and joined the faculty of Mills College in Oakland, where he remained until 1947. Like much of his wartime output, the Second Concerto has a reflective and sometimes melancholic character beneath its characteristic technical fluency. The three-movement structure follows the classical fast-slow-fast pattern, with a particularly beautiful slow movement.