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RITE OF SPRING
A celebration of Igor Stravinsky.
By Alex Ross
The New Yorker original
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May 19, 2008
The festival provided an intimate encounter
with a cool, circumspect composer.
ILLUSTRATION: DAVID HUGHES
Miller Theatre’s Stravinsky Festival, a five-concert tribute to the undefeated champion of musical modernism, began with a witty and touching conceit that captured the composer’s impish spirit. At first glance, the opening concert, which took place at the Morgan Library, seemed to be an odd mélange of Stravinsky, early, middle, and late. Members of the International Contemporary Ensemble, or ICE, gave fired-up performances under the rhythmically vibrant baton of Jayce Ogren, but the sequence felt disconcertingly random, as if Stravinsky’s collected works were playing on Shuffle. First, the “Dumbarton Oaks” Concerto, from 1937-38; then the “Eight Instrumental Miniatures,” completed in Los Angeles in 1962; and the Concertino, “Ragtime,” and the Octet, all from the period 1917-23. Soon, though, I noticed that the number of music stands was diminishing, from fifteen to twelve to eleven to eight, and the organizing principle became clear. The concert might have been titled “And Then There Were None,” after the Agatha Christie novel, in which country-house guests are killed off one by one. Following intermission came the Septet; the Pastorale for violin and four winds; the Three Pieces for String Quartet; and various trios, duos, and solos. The last few items were heard without a break: two trumpet players positioned above the stage performed “Fanfare for a New Theatre” before handing off to two bassoonists at the back of the hall, who offered up the “Lied Ohne Name” and yielded to Joshua Rubin, who ambled in to render the Three Pieces for clarinet. By the end, only a piano remained. A stagehand placed music on the desk, and the piano, with the aid of Disklavier technology, executed the Étude for pianola, from 1917. In the mind’s eye, Stravinsky got up to take a bow.
The first great virtue of the Miller festival, which, in a Stravinskyish journey of exile, abandoned its parent venue and unfolded variously at the Morgan, St.Bartholomew’s Church, and the Park Avenue Armory, was that it steered clear of the hits. Stravinsky hardly suffers from neglect—he ranked ninth on the League of American Orchestras’ most recent list of frequently performed composers—but his early ballet scores are the main engine of his popularity; much of his vast catalogue languishes unheard. After the opening cavalcade of rarities, ICE returned to participate in a program of Stravinsky’s songs, ranging from “Storm Cloud,” of 1902, to “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat,” of 1966. Two subsequent programs, in the chapel at St. Bartholomew’s, surveyed works for one and two pianos and for violin and piano. And, in the central offering, George Steel, the Miller’s director, conducted the Vox Vocal Ensemble and the Gotham City Orchestra in a mostly sacred program: the Mass, “Requiem Canticles,” the Variations, and “Symphony of Psalms.” The “Canticles,” Stravinsky’s hard-edged, tenderhearted farewell, has long been counted among his greatest achievements, and yet, by my count, New Yorkers have heard it only about once a decade.
The festival’s second virtue was to free Stravinsky from the tyranny
of style—the master narrative of his progression through various
twentieth-century techniques, from late Romanticism to dissonant folklorism
and on to musical surrealism, neoclassicism, grand opera, and twelve-tone
writing. Seen from that angle, the composer resembles a canny cabinet
minister in an unstable banana republic who maintains his position through
successive Communist, fascist, and democratic regimes. Yet Stravinsky
was also a painstaking artisan, whose fastidiousness often undermined
his popular appeal. If fame had been his ultimate goal, he would hardly
have spent so much time devising quirky confections for impractical combinations
of instruments. The Miller festival, by jettisoning chronology in favor
of formal groupings (chamber works, songs, and so on), provided an unusually
intimate encounter with a man who habitually presented a cool, circumspect
profile to the world.
Most listeners, myself included, first encountered this repertory on
recordings. Our view of Stravinsky has long been refracted through an
electronic prism, in the form of the comprehensive survey of his work
that appeared on Columbia Records in the nineteen-forties, fifties, and
sixties. Funded in part with proceeds from the original-cast recording
of “My Fair Lady,” the Stravinsky Edition remains a staggering
achievement, yet it has its limitations; at times, you sense the musicians
picking their way cautiously across what was then treacherous rhythmic
terrain. Even the best recordings fail to capture the full physicality
of this composer’s sound—the airy resonance of his soft harmonies,
the sucker punch of his nastier chords, the non-stop tremor of his rhythms.
Looking around at the audience during the Miller festival, I noticed
how many listeners were bopping gently in their seats. Meanwhile, the
best of today’s younger performers, more than a few of whom fill
the ranks of ICE, find no difficulties in this music; whether they have
studied Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” by day
or danced to hip-hop by night, they are inheritors of Stravinsky’s
rhythmic DNA. In all, the composer emerged as a less brittle, detached
figure—more visceral, more emotionally revealing.
In a famous aphorism—“I consider music by its very nature powerless to express anything”—Stravinsky renounced emotionalism in art. But he said such things to discourage Romantic excess, not to call forth bloodless interpretations. The ideal Stravinsky performance is one in which emotion steals in unannounced. Exactly this happened in the Octet, when the players of ICE arrived at the sweet little dominant-seventh chord that lingers at the end of the introduction to the first movement; it was a shiver of eighteenth-century sentiment amid nineteen-twenties bustle. There was a similarly heart-catching moment toward the end of the Concerto for Piano and Winds, which Stephen Gosling and Eric Huebner, two formidable young pianists, played in its rarely heard two-piano reduction. In a finale otherwise given over to sardonic-sounding ersatz anthems, subdued dissonances open a door into some secret zone of wistfulness and regret. The trick in executing such passages is to keep the tempo steady and the tone pristine—as in those passages in Proust where the narrator threatens to collapse in an anguish of nostalgia before resuming his dry recitation of the guest list for one of Mme. Verdurin’s salons.
The concert of religious masterpieces—works in which Stravinsky came closest to opening his heart—took place in the monumental Drill Hall at the Park Avenue Armory. This space hosted monster classical concerts back in the eighteen-eighties and nineties, but it mostly served other uses for much of the twentieth century. New management has made the hall available for performance once again; the Lincoln Center Festival will stage Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s gargantuan antiwar opera “Die Soldaten” there in July, and New York City Opera plans to use the site for a production of Messiaen’s “St. Francis” in 2009. The Drill Hall has the acoustics of a great cathedral, in both a good and a bad sense. Sounds reverberate for about five seconds; fast music tends to devolve into a blur; bass easily overpowers treble. Conductors will have to work hard on balances and keep their beat diagrammatically clear.
The acoustics nearly drowned the Variations, an elaborate serialist piece that periodically breaks down into twelve rhythmically independent parts. But in the most intricately layered section of “Requiem Canticles”—the section in which vocal soloists chant the Libera Me while the rest of the chorus mutters the text at greater speed—the murkiness evoked the chaos of Judgment Day. And the epilogue of “Symphony of Psalms,” which Steel took at a daringly slow tempo, dissolved into a dream landscape, with brass chords ringing endlessly and timpani notes booming forth like low bells. Stravinsky wrote the work for the secular temple of Boston’s Symphony Hall, but it has the architecture and the atmosphere of a churchly space. Perhaps it was no coincidence that, about five minutes before the concert began, the motorcade of Pope Benedict XVI passed by on the street outside.
Copyright © 2008 The New Yorker
