Who actually listens to Stravinsky?

[karlhenning]

Of course that's an unusual event. I wasn't even talking about new, contemporary music (most of which gets a couple of performances and then it's over), but concertos that should be considered as 20th century classics.

Understood.  In the case of this piece, my opinion is that on musical merits it has the legs to become a classic;  but the environment is a question . . . and as you rightly observe, when the program says "world premiere," it tends to mean "final performance."

[karlhenning]

The Symphony in C hasn't captured me the way that the Symphony in Three Movements or the Symphony in Psalms has

That was true for me for a while, until I sat down and tried to make sense of it. I think my initial problem is that it's a classical-style symphony which doesn't necessarily behave like one - for instance, that drawn-out, inconclusive ending (actually the whole finale is kind of confusing and episodic on first listen).

I don't think it was the ending that tripped me up earlier (I might not have made it that far my first couple of listens).  Now, that last movement is one of the things I love best about the piece . . . Stravinsky's trademark 'timeless' coda emerging out of energetic symphonism . . . .

[vandermolen]

I listened recently to the 'Symphony of Psalms' which came with BBC Music Magazine. This is possibly my favourite work by Stravinsky alongside The Rite of Spring, Firebird and Apollo.

[jowcol]

I'd still have to rank Les Noces as his masterwork.

For some reason, I used to need to listen to the middle movement of the Ebony Concerto whenever I got dumped.  Something about the sour and moody feel would speak to me. The ending is also real strong.  One of his best.

(the obvious early ballets are an obvious choice. There is nothing I love more than the Firebird, and Le Sacre is hard to turn down.  I must admit that  Petrushka doesn't move me as much).

I like his stuff in the Early 20s a lot-- the Octet, Symphonies for Wind, and Piano Concerto.  Get into the later 20s and a different story. the Fairy's Kiss bores me, and Apollo is tough to sit through, although the last minute or so is brilliant. Ihave the last couple minutes as a separate track on my mp3 player.

I'd have to rank the Symphony of Psalms and last movement of Dumbarton Oaks as faves.

The Tango is a nice. 

And I really like Agon.   I think it is one of the coolest 12 tone forays I've ever heard.

I would also rank the 45 Symphony over the one in C, which I never really got, either.

Oh!  The Nightingale!  Definitely a winner!


One of the tradeoffs of someone like Stravinsky who was compelled to invent new styles is that you get some transitional works that are neither fish nor foul. 

[Ugh!]

I'd still have to rank Les Noces as his masterwork.

All the versions with the different instrumentations truly makes this a fascinating work to dwelve into, I agree. Personally I rank many of his short miniatures highly, but right now the focus is all on the Octet. There is simply no end to the musical complexities and details to discover in that piece...

[Mark G. Simon]

Gee, I listen to Stravinsky a lot!! He's one of my two favorite composers (Haydn's the other).

And judging by all the chatter last year, when the 22 CD Stravinsky conducts Stravinsky box came on sale, he's a favorite of a lot of folks here.

[Living_Stradivarius]

I recently listened to Stravinsky's Violin Concerto. Rarely performed and with good reason, in my opinion. Too esoteric relative to his better known works.

[karlhenning]

Well, it would be a dull world if all violin concerti sounded like Mendelssohn.

[Herman]

I recently listened to Stravinsky's Violin Concerto. Rarely performed and with good reason, in my opinion. Too esoteric relative to his better known works.

well, give it another listen or two, and you'll find it gets less esoteric every time.

it's a gem.

[Mark G. Simon]

Stravinsky Violin Concerto is a lovely piece. I got to know it from a recording with Ivry Gitlis as the soloist (Hindemith Violin Concerto on the other side). Very peculiar tone that violinist had, but somehow that made the music sound all the more distinctive. There are no doubt better recordings out there, in fact I have one of them come to think of it. Arthur Grumiaux is the soloist.

I heard it performed live by the Atlanta Symphony (I think) with Ruth Posselt as soloist (I'm not certain here; I may be totally wrong on both counts) in 1971 in a huge hall that dissipated the delicate sound of the orchestration. As a Stravinsky fanatic, I was thrilled just the same.

[Dancing Divertimentian]

Yes, the violin concerto is a great work. I have recordings by Mullova (Philips) and Kyung-Wha Chung (Decca).

Can't understand the hostility.

[Drasko]

Stravinsky Violin Concerto is a lovely piece. I got to know it from a recording with Ivry Gitlis as the soloist (Hindemith Violin Concerto on the other side). Very peculiar tone that violinist had...

Still alive, still performing and I should hear him in about two weeks playing Chausson and Saint-Saens. I'm very curious to hear if that gurgling tone of his is still there.

[(poco) Sforzando]

well, give it another listen or two, and you'll find it gets less esoteric every time.

it's a gem.

I agree, and when seen in the Balanchine choreography it acquires a whole new dimension. (Easily available on one of the Nonesuch DVDs, danced by NYCB greats like Peter Martins, Kay Mazzo, and Karin von Aroldigen.) Hardly esoteric either, if anything a representative and fairly easily digested example of Stravinsky's neo-classic style in the period that culminated in The Rake's Progress. I would say that you want a truly "esoteric" work of Stravinsky's, my prime candidate would be Threni - a piece that after some 40 years still seems to me austere, strange, and impenetrable to a degree matched by nothing else in his output.

[Herman]

I listened to the Violin Cto last night, the only version I could find at that time, Perlman, Barenboim, CSO (other ones turned up this morning), and it's just such marvellous, mysterious music.

BTW one thing to keep in mind with the Nonesuch DVD is that Balanchine had adapted the choreography to suit the tv-representation. All the action is strangely oriented towards the camera. Nowadays people don't do this anymore, but in the sixties and seventies this was a hip idea.

[Hector]

The Symphony in C hasn't captured me the way that the Symphony in Three Movements or the Symphony in Psalms has (or the way much else in Stravinsky's oeuvre has) . . . but I'm going to try it again.

Likewise. It pays dividends to persist I find.

[Joe Barron]

Somwhat on topic, here's an article I just wrote about an upcoming perfromance of another one of my favorites:

By Joe Barron
Staff Writer

"A Soldier's Tale," Igor Stravinsky's low-rent traveling show, is a protean masterwork. It may be performed as pure, abstract music in the composer's 25-minute concert suite, as a fully staged theater piece with actors, dancers and sets, or in any one of a number of intermediate forms.

While the music works wonderfully by itself, the spoken libretto — written in French but usually performed in the language of the audience — gives it greater emotional and illustrative power, and in the 90 years since the work's premiere, an optimal version with a single narrator has evolved. It is this version the Curtis Institute of Music will present at Cheltenham High School Nov. 18.

Curtis students will make up the seven-piece band called for in his score, and David Ludwig, a member of the Curtis  composition faculty, will provide both the narration and the voices of the work's two characters — the solder of the title and the devil. With the tryout in Cheltenham under their belts, the young musicians will take the work on tour as part of Curtis' outreach program.

"I think they've definitely chosen students who are outstanding," Ludwig said last week. "These are the students who are going to represent the school in Maine, in Seattle, all over. Every student at that school is up to playing anything we put in front of them, and not just in theory."

Ludwig's presence onstage Nov. 18 continues another tradition that has grown up around the piece — that of casting composers in the stage roles. Such eminences as Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, Milton Babbitt and John Cage have all taken part in staged readings of the piece, paying homage to the Holy Ghost of 20th century music.

"If you're a composer today, it's hard to not count Stravinsky as one of your influences," Ludwig said. "It's in everything. It's taken all of us in different ways."
In another, more explicit homage, Ludwig is writing a piece with the same instrumentation as "A Soldier's Tale," to be performed on the Curtis concert tour (though not at Cheltenham High).

When he first heard the piece in the early 1920s, the Danish composer Carl Nielsen, who was only 17 years older than Stravinsky, objected to its lean, vibrato-less textures in a striking metaphor. "The human body is equally unattractive to me when it is too fat and when the skeleton is clearly visible," he said. But Nielsen overlooked the muscle, and besides, Stravinsky's scoring is a model of small-color coloration. He calls for one high and one low instrument from each of the three major instrumental groups — violin and bass, clarinet and bassoon, trumpet and trombone — and a single percussionist whose prominent role is unprecedented in the history of chamber music. Stravinsky had discovered jazz during the First World War, and he once likened his little orchestra to a jazz band with the bassoon subbing for a saxophone.

"For sure, it's definitely a landmark piece for a percussionist," Ben Folk, the drummer in the Nov. 18 performance, said in a telephone interview Nov. 3. "It definitely has a very strong voice. The ending is unique: He ends the piece with percussion. With the narration, it works beautifully. The soldier marching away. The devil dances."

Even though he gets the last word, Folk said his favorite part of the score is the tango, which allows him to perform a duet with violinist Josef Špacek. He has laid out his instruments in a way, he said, that requires him to cross his hands frequently during the three-minute section.

"I feel like I'm dancing with the violinist when I play it," he said.

At a basic, symbolic level, the tango presents the contrast between the devil and the soldier in its starkest terms. The percussionist plays the devil's music throughout the work, and the violin represents of the soldier's soul. In the first half, the devil purchases the soldier's fiddle with a book that can predict the future. In the second, the soldier wins the fiddle back by purposely losing to the devil at cards.
Stravinsky and his librettist, the Swiss writer C.F. Ramuz, based the narrative on a series of Russian folk tales. The soldier's name is Joseph — Joe the Soldier, in the parlance of the election just past. He is well meaning enough, but weak-willed and just a little dim. A well times suggestion from the narrator allows him to hold out against the devil's trickery, but in the end he forgets himself and is led off to hell.

"Ultimately, it's sort of dark and nihilistic," Ludwig said. "The devil is a classic character that appears later in [Stravinsky's opera] 'The Rake's Progress.' He's crafty and conniving. Not a being of pure evil, but a trickster."

Stravinsky, too, is a trickster, and in this score, a delightful one. Besides the tango, he has included a dizzy little waltz, an American rag scarcely recognizable as such, a hint of "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," and a royal march in which, though some kind of musical alchemy, he manages to make his small ensemble sound like a full brass band.

For all of its macabre playfulness, however, the score also contains, in the little section marked "Pastorale," the loveliest music Stravinsky wrote after "The Firebird."

It's safe to say Stravinsky isn't heard very often in Montgomery County, and "A Soldier's Tale" promises to be the most memorable musical event of the year out here in the suburbs.

[The new erato]

Schoenberg?

[The new erato]

OK, R Craft. But have just read S Walsh's two volume Stravinsky biography and fail to see the devil in him.....

[The new erato]

fear of litigation'

No...probablys just stupidity, but I'm willing to be educated.

[The new erato]

Don't understand your comment. Stupidity on whose part?'

Thoughty that was I clear as I fail to see the devil in him and am willing to be educated. So please tell.....