IGOR STRAVINSKY

Igor Stravinsky

(Oranienbaum, 1882 – New York, 1971)

If for Debussy we asked ourselves if it was true glory, for Stravinsky we should ask ourselves how much glory is left. The name of the Russian musician - like that of Picasso in painting - literally merged with the concept of music in the twentieth century, to the point of becoming consubstantial with it and engulfing any other composer, including Schönberg, whose popularity was practically nil outside the specialist circle, while Stravinsky, as well as a cultural icon, was a world star like Chaplin and, indeed, Picasso. His name, in the popular imagination, has always been associated with the idea of ​​a difficult, new music that messed up all the parameters and from which one could expect anything. However modest, this view was not far from the truth. The fact is that he, an inexhaustible promoter of himself, has always done everything to consolidate his image of enfant terrible even at the age of sixty: the instigator of scandals, sulphurous criticisms, fierce battles. Always in the spotlight, ready to judge and draw conclusions also through written memoirs, popular texts, public statements, axiomatic assertions. A character to be taken with a grain of salt: caustic, sardonic, basically elusive, which is impossible to trace back to grand gestures or acclaimed positions beyond musical prominence. The critics themselves, faced with the contradictory field choices of this man, wrote everything and the opposite of everything about him, pointing him at the same time as a renewer and grave-digger of 20th-century music. However, all of this matters relatively little to us. As I have already written, what really interests us is the current presence, through the record document (and therefore public approval), of a given author through those compositions that still have a sequel. Stravinsky's discography is monumental and truly starts from afar, from the first electric recordings of the same author and spares practically none of the greats on the podium, where even Furtwängler and Klemperer have left irrelevant but probative evidence of an inescapable interest in this author. After a first series of mono recordings intended for 78 rpm, between the 1950s and 1960s Stravinsky recorded his entire repertoire in stereo for CBS, currently available in the SONY catalogue. Therefore, anyone who wants to listen to even the most marginal compositions of Stravinsky interpreted by him can turn to this important legacy. I do not refer to it here for the simple reason that I find Stravinsky a gifted but utterly mediocre conductor compared with, say, a Bernstein or an Ansermet. So let's see what of so much glory is currently alive and operating at the recording level.

L'oiseau de feu (The Firebird), Complete Ballet Orchestras of Romance Switzerland Conductor: Ernest Ansermet (Decca, 1957)

L'oiseau de feu (The Firebird), Complete Ballet Montreal Symphony Orchestra Conductor: Charles Dutoit (Decca, 1985)

L'oiseau de feu (The Firebird), Suite from 1911 Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra Conductor: Lorin Maazel (Deutsche Grammophon, 1957)

It is the closest score to the world of Rimsky-Korsakov that exists. If you don't know what you're listening to (it happens with certain radio invasions in cars, for example) you can very well confuse the Firebird Suite with entire pages of Sheherazade . It happened to me with Stravinsky's number of the Game of Princesses with Golden Apples . For several minutes I thought I was listening to the piece about the prince and the princess, the third of Rimsky's Symphony Suite Op. 35. It happens. But it was to give an idea of ​​how much Stravinsky, in defiance of his alleged musical ancestry from Old Russian mugiks , is in fact the most successful son of the great Rimsky, whose style above all this famous Ballet is literally imbued with. But it is the whole Ballet, absolutely ingenious and full of extraordinary melodic ideas, which overflows with the most heterogeneous Russian styles: in addition to Rimsky also Mus-sorgsky and Tchaikovsky, which Stravinsky alternates with an incredible skill. Such a jumble of trends that add up requires conductors with extensive repertoire experience. Ansermet, who was also a close friend of the author, treats him in the same way: inserting him without delay in that late-romantic current that flows into Paris at the beginning of the 20th century. Therefore, no search for, however non-existent, details that allude to Stravinsky's future metamorphoses. Let's stay with Rimsky, for heaven's sake: just move on. Dutoit would seem to be the least suitable conductor to illustrate the speciously demonic world of the Russian composer. Quite the contrary. In the Bird the colorism of fire , the brushstroke that flakes on the canvas, the detail hidden by mists of indefinable color are there, and how. A born colourist, with a broad breadth and cadenced but certain progress of the path followed, Dutoit created this dazzling reproduction of the Ballet in 1985 without ever forcing, i.e. without inserting in the Bird the demonic fury of the spring festival is on fire . All those moments benefited greatly from it, and there are many, in which lyricism and sentimental abandon take center stage. Ultimately, a fresh Stravinsky, innovator but referable to a very clear tradition. How it should be. The Suite in five movements, which Stravinsky extracted from the Complete Ballet in 1911 (but would make two more, in 1919 and 1947) is perhaps the most engraved version. Among the many editions, the supremely elegant one created by Maazel in Berlin in 1957 remains a fixed stage in the discography of this composition due to the Tuscan precision of the instrumental weights and colors, with powerful dynamic affirmations and timbral transparency that make the entire score a sort of crystalline enamel, on which the story is engraved.

Petruŝka, 1947 Version Philadephia Orchestra Conductor: Eugen Ormandy (CBS-SONY, 1964)

Petruŝka, 1911 and 1947 Versions Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Conductor: David Zinman (Telarc, 1991)

When the Petruŝka Ballet was given in Vienna two years after its Paris premiere in 1911, the Staatsoper orchestra refused to perform it on the grounds that the music was dirty . Today we have no idea of ​​the effect such a composition could have had at that time. It is true that with this by now two-tonal work and with overlapping rhythms the author was opening up new paths, but listened to again today Petruŝka is absolutely harmless, perfectly cohesive with Fokine's choreographic script, all oscillating between now pressing and now slowed down rhythms and dense oases of pathetic lyricism, perfect soundtrack to one of Chaplin's first films, of which Stravinsky anticipates times, situations, amused digressions, surreal misunderstandings , misery hanging from a kicked stone and a deserted street that wedges itself in The End . Seldom has a composer been as prophetic as Stravinsky was in this Ballet in portraying the squalor of a world of automatons (even if we are dealing here with puppets). We are truly in today's black and white cinema, in the bedraggled and floured face of Buster Keaton, in the vanquished of all the slums of the European and American metropolises. In the story of the three puppets and the puppeteer, in the cruel representation of a human condition which is governed by a mocking and unknowable destiny (against which there is no longer any Beethovenian struggle), the human condition of all is glimpsed, not only of the marginalized and the poor in spirit. The difficulty with this score is that, repeatedly highlighted, of the gratuitous underlining, of the hand pressing on the wax. It's not the case. The cold timbres of the instruments and the irregular rhythms of the narration, the prevalence of a world of repainted tin and rags also emerge with a simply objective reading. The spasmodic search for additional tensions and a lowering of the color temperature, here too in search of non-existent Schönbergian grotesque connections, have often produced gratuitously dehumanized readings. On the contrary, the monstrous that Petruŝka communicates to us is born and materialized precisely from the solemnly calm exposition of the sumptuous atmosphere with which the Ballet opens its doors, to then go through all the episodes touching the apex with those pathetic assertions entrusted to the trumpet, derisory and tragic like certain smiles of Charlie Chaplin. I must say that among many and many readings of Petruŝka that of Ormandy with the Philadephia orchestra refers to this genre painting, without additions, without scholias or glosses that attract the eye to who knows what dodeca-phonic recordings: that is, without metallizing a bodywork full of holes and original oxidized plaques. Like Ormandy, but featuring both the 1911 and 1947 versions (the year of the remake of the instrumental and even the numerical order), is David Zinman with the Baltimore Symphony, in one of Telarc's great natural recordings.

La Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) Israel Philharmonic Orchestra Conductor: Leonard Bernstein (Deutsche Grammophon, 1982)

New York Metropolitan Orchestra Conductor: James Levine (Deutsche Grammophon, 1992)

Along with Ravel's Boléro and Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, the Sagra is the best-known and most performed musical composition of the twentieth century. Very few other works compete for the place: Pines of Rome by Respighi, Carmina Burana by Orff (which without Stravinsky 's wedding would not be what they are), Barber 's Adagio , Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky , perhaps the Music for Strings by Bartók, certainly Strauss's Vier letzte Lieder : a handful of notes compared to the 19th century. But so much is left. During a rehearsal of the Festival with the Schleswig Holstein Orchestra, Leonard Bernstein came out with this apodictic affirmation about this work that had perhaps the greatest interpreter in him: "The Spring Festival is... sex!" It is not difficult, once you have listened to a Bernstein recording of this controversial ballet, to understand what the great American conductor meant by that "sex". But Stravinsky's recording with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra is anything but sex: prudent, considerate, boneless: yes, it is a festival, but one of moderation, common sense, in full disavowal, practically half a century later, of that other festival that he himself had written: that of the senses that explode, of the teeth that bite, of the agile and loose limbs, of the primordial nature, carnal and omnivorous, ancestral and fearful. This ecumenical and immanent opulence that explodes and frightens in the Sacre has been opposed in several, starting with the ambulatory screen-graphies of Pierre Boulez and Claudio Abbado, both bards of serial interpretations of the first Stravinsky. I remember the record reviews especially relating to Boulez, in which the French conductor's ineffable ability to underline the underlining was exalted: that is, to enucleate from the instrumental timbres dizzying kinships with Webern, Varèse, Stockhausen. So I went to hear Boulez with in mind the primordial paintings evoked by Bernstein in the CBS version with the New York Philharmonic, and in the end I found myself pregnant with two certainties: first, that I was bored; the second, that I didn't understand anything. Bored, because passing from Bernstein's (or Levine's) Sacre to Boulez's is equivalent to drinking tepid water instead of an iced Coca Cola in the heat. Certainly instead of my obtuseness and my dark future, because in the bassoons of the Sacre I hadn't been able to catch an assonance with the Kammersinfonie Op. 21 or with Ionisation for 13 percussionists . So, in the belief that I was doomed to cultural extinction, I kept listening to Bernstein 's The Rite of Spring . And today I know that I did well. But everyone can see for themselves with some comparative listening. More than sex, it is the daimon that Bernstein was referring to when speaking of the Sagra , the Dionysian vital force inherent in man and nature. This work is from 1913: a fateful year, which would have seen the emergence of another tear in the musical culture of the twentieth century: that is , Schönberg's Pierrot lunaire , of which I am the least suited to speak, but which today can only be enjoyed by intellectuals equipped with instruments of refined perceptibility. According to an accepted vulgate, both works would present the epochal advent of the Great War and the end of an era. I don't discuss it. But what emerges from the Festival is above all the sense of the primitive understood as a mythical and ritual manifestation, where cosmic times influence man's biological nature and determine it with the most external bestiality and with the most violent pelvic appeal. In fact, they had never heard more frightening sounds coming from a symphony orchestra; never had an audience been assaulted by more terrifying rhythms, for Stravinsky is above all that: an extreme manifestation of natural forces. In the Sagra the chords have the weight of the pyramids; the dynamic progressions refer to protohistoric hurricanes; the roars of the instruments dwell in our most ancient fears: we find ourselves in a dream, or rather, in a previous life, where every moment can catch us captivated by the bodies of virgins or in the jaws of repulsive reptiles. No one had ever conceived of something like this, no one had ever descended so deeply into man's DNA, soliciting astonishment, disgust, annoyance, nausea, horror, vertigo. Only Boulez and the critics who countersigned Stravinsky's interpretations know how all this can then be traced back to Webern's sobs. As for the Great War, I agree that the horrors of the Carso and Verdun can very well be illustrated by the Sacre in terms of violence and rhythmic monstrosity. But I think the artist's famous prophetic sensibility just doesn't work here, because Stravinsky doesn't present anything at all. His spontaneous genius looks back, not forward, and all in all it is significant that the Disney writers have used passages from the Sacred to illustrate the extinction of the dinosaurs. Exactly one hundred years after its Paris premiere, this composition is still capable of leaving one astonished and almost terrified, provided that the interpretation is exactly what Bernstein summed up in one word in front of the astonished Schleswig Holstein instrumentalists: sex! Sex as an impulse devoid of civil connotations, alien to cultural profiles, impermeable to any form of conceptual logic: the deep and dangerous core (Freud explained it to us) of being a man. Among the endless recordings of the Sagra I have undoubtedly indicated the extreme Bernstein of the Israeli version of 1982 and the metropolitan recording of Levine 10 years later. They are not alternatives and to both there is no limit to a, let's say it, Dionysian approach to this work. In both the maximum sound power and the most violent rhythmic scansion dominate unchallenged, giving the idea of ​​an apocalypse in which we remain petrified, to the point that one would feel like covering one's head with one's hands. Other readings of these primordial dimensions, where the violence of nature reaches the limit of the bearable, I do not know. Karajan, in his time, attempted a mediation between sound power and mysterious nocturnal illustrations, perhaps giving more substance to the original aspect of myth and human sacrifice, and he too reached a disturbing level of depth. Muti and Maazel took the same path, while a certain French school, Monteux and Ansermet, for example, in some way adhered to the abregée vision , in emotional terms, of the same author. I have already mentioned Boulez and his serialization of the entire sound universe, including Mahler. While writing this section dedicated to Stravinsky I have often asked myself: what is left of him after this prestigious and tumultuous spring of his life, after this festival in which, in three years, from 1910 to 1913, he conceived and created three absolute masterpieces of the musical art of the twentieth century, still able to speak to everyone? In pure recording terms, after the triad of the Ballets, the situation decidedly worsened. Of course, the incisions are many, but they are starting to thin out significantly. The whole so-called neoclassical period is very well represented by the record, from Pulcinella to Jeu de cartes , from Oedipus Rex to Il Bacio della fata , from Apollon Musagète to Perséphone to Sinfonia di Salmi. Artists of very different backgrounds and natures have tried their hand at it, but the diffusion of these compositions among the large disc public is certainly very small if compared to that of the Ballets. Let's not talk about the last Stravinsky, the one who unexpectedly embraces the dodecaphony, the one of the Canticum sacrum and the Lamentationes . However, dismissing this great protagonist of music of the last century as an artist who, after an initial explosion of genius, falls into the most astute and gilded mediocrity is not only unfair, it's not true. Certainly Stravinsky's artistic parable baffles anyone: starting from the 1920s, the cannibalistic invasion of territories that are not his, the changes of course, the homogenization of old and new, the use and abuse of techniques primitive or highly refined are such as to disorient critics and audiences even today, almost as if a thousand years of Western music are arrogantly summed up in him. Therefore, without prejudice to the three great Ballets of his youth, one must move with caution in Stravinsky's work: surprises and discomforts are often just around the corner. For example, one wonders whether works of solid fame such as Apollon Musagète will appear to be nothing more than a rehashing of a late eighteenth-century symphonism, without particularly relevant ideas, and completely irrelevant if it hadn't been Stravinsky who wrote it. Of works such as Pulcinella and Jeu de cartes there are several among the neoclassical works of those years; and not even the commitment lavished on Oedipus Rex and in the Mass reaches the peak of genius as it appeared at the beginning of the 1910s. Here: this is the burning question. What would have survived of Stravinsky if he had not composed The Firebird, Petruŝka and The Rite of Spring ? Beyond all considerations, of Stravinsky it can be said that his entire oeuvre, whether we consider it the extreme offshoot of Rimsky-Korsakov, the osmotic imitation of eighteenth-century Italian and ancient polyphony or the assumption of Weber-nian contours , will almost always have an advantage over that of the majority of 20th-century composers and it will be that – as Confalonieri sacrosanctly writes – of always being “recognizable and understandable due to the presence of those thematic articulations, of that representation of the sound contours, of that consensus on the part of our natural musical structure, for that equivalence between its proceeding and the typical forms of our knowledge which constituted and will eternally constitute the reasons for truth in music". I obviously leave it up to everyone - after searching for Stravinsky on the records and through the bibliography - to respond in their own way to what I myself still wonder. Personally, on the planet of another galaxy, I would take those three Ballets by Stravinsky. The rest, however remarkable and a source of pleasure and meditation, can also remain here on our Earth.