Past Seasons , Truth to Power. Related January 13, Now 89, Sir Neville Marriner believes what's hardest about becoming a geriatric conductor is how demand for public appearances increases, rather than wanes. Romanian-born conductor Cristian Macelaru, January 10, This all-Stravinsky disc features Stravinsky at his most playful and most motoric, in the neo-classical Pulcinella and the brawny Symphony in Three Movements.
October 13, For listeners unfamiliar with the works of Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich and Igor Stravinsky, they might expect to hear significant similarities among their compositions. All three were Rus This means that you should expect to see features of the Baroque in this piece. Try and have a think what features of tonality, harmony, texture and so forth, are prevalent in Baroque pieces. Now, if you analyse the piece with the Baroque features in mind, and pretend that you are looking at an actual piece composed in , this makes the process of spotting Neoclassical features a whole lot easier!
The instrumentation is entirely wind instruments — and even involves instruments that were really rare in music back then — like horns, oboes, and flute. From all this, it is clear that there were modern influences, and is not a direct replica of a Baroque piece: and there you have it, a Neoclassical feature! The public comes into contact with these musical objects and feels emotion, or not.
The Symphonies of Wind Instruments is sometimes seen as the start of the neoclassical period, or a staging post on the way, but Pulcinella and the short opera Mavra are stylistic signposts also.
But the Octet is also often referred to as the beginning of neoclassicism in Stravinsky's music. It has a classical title evoking Schubert, uses classical forms such as sonata, variation and fugue, and the composer published an article about it — a sort of formalist manifesto. Its premiere was the first time Stravinsky conducted public, which might account for his nerves. Stravinsky began to struggle financially at this time as Russia was not part of the Berne Convention, creating problems collecting royalties for Ballets Russes performances of his work, now less frequent anyway.
One source of income for the composer was performing, so he brushed up his piano technique and embarked on recitals through the s and '30s, for which he wrote new music for himself and his pianist son Soulima to play. Stravinsky composed at the piano, a piano had featured in Petrushka , and four pianos are required for Les Noces. Eventually his catalogue would feature a host of works for piano solo, piano duets, works for two pianos, for piano and violin, and piano and orchestra.
There are also many arrangements to or from piano versions. Even more than his friend Ravel, his worklist is swollen by pieces which exist in more than one guise, even if re-composition is sometimes involved. He had not composed music so harmonically spiky and rhythmically orgiastic, of such compactness, propulsive intensity, and polyphonic richness since The Rite of Spring.
Ballet scores for Diaghilev from The Firebird to Les Noces provided his rise to European fame, even though he later saw them as the climax and the end of the Russian tradition he inherited. But although his ballet scores later found homes in concert halls, he always defended the aesthetics of good stage presentation. Thus the balletomane probably has a greater claim to be a fully paid-up Stravinskian than the concert-goer. Opera too was the backdrop to his childhood, as his father was principal bass at the Mariinsky Theatre, which was virtually next door to his home.
Musically it again references the past. Leonard Bernstein, in his Harvard Lectures, nailed the Verdi influence, well before it was known that Stravinsky was such a Verdi lover that he would rearrange tours to take in performances of Verdi operas.
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