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Music Review

Many Instruments, One With No Player

By Allan Kozinn
The New York Times original link
Published: April 12, 2008

To present a five-part Stravinsky Festival, the Miller Theater has migrated to the East Side. The opening concert — an enlightening chamber music program, vigorously played by the International Contemporary Ensemble — was at the Morgan Library & Museum on Wednesday evening. Other installments are at the Morgan, the Park Avenue Armory and St. Bartholomew’s Church.

The point of this festival is not to offer a comprehensive overview of Stravinsky: the closest you get to a war horse here is the “Symphony of Psalms,” although movements from “Petrouchka” and “Firebird” turn up on some of the chamber programs. Instead the series looks at less frequently heard chamber, vocal and choral works.

This program included 15 scores for a kaleidoscope of instrumental combinations, as well as a few for soloists and one — the rollicking Étude for Pianola (1917) — for an instrument without a performer. Instead of a player piano, this performance used a Yamaha piano driven by digital impulses. Cory Smythe programmed the digital equivalent of a piano roll, which animated the instrument.

Among the more conventionally virtuosic performances, Joshua Rubin’s rendering of the Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet (1918) made the soulful opening movement as vivid, in its way, as the speedy, bent-note finale. The “Fanfare for a New Theater” (1964) for two trumpets and “Lied Ohne Name” (1918) for two bassoons also offered a high quotient of dazzle. And Maiya Papach gave a ruminative, focused performance of the “Elegy for Viola” (1944).

As a chamber music composer, Stravinsky was mostly a miniaturist who could pack an enormous amount of music into a few moments. The Three Pieces for String Quartet (1914), for example, are texturally dense essays that juxtapose grittiness and lyricism. His Double Canon (1959) is plangent and dark, and oddly inconclusive: it seems to end midphrase, like the final fugue of Bach’s “Art of Fugue.”

Bach’s spirit lingered over other works too, notably the “Dumbarton Oaks” Concerto (1938), which was written as a companion to the “Brandenburgs” and applies Stravinskian harmonic notions to Bachian rhythms and textures. The Septet (1953) is also built of Baroque moves (with a decidedly French accent).

Other sides of Stravinsky on display included the sweet-toned innocence of the early “Pastorale” (1907, in a 1933 arrangement); the acidic jazziness of “Ragtime” (1918) and the Concertino for 12 Instruments (1920, arranged 1952), which recall a similar style in “L’Histoire du Soldat”; and the plain, slightly sour modernism of the Octet for Wind Instruments (1923) and “Epitaphium” (1959).

The performances, conducted by Jayce Ogren when the ensembles were large enough, were consistently polished and energetic.