Stravinsky Article

March 2011

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the

Stravinsky project

inside: National Philharmonic Seymour Lipkin plays Beethoven

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Baltimore Symphony Orchestra The (musical) genius of Charlie Chaplin

Washington Performing Arts Society Pianist Marc-AndrĂŠ Hamelin

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Strathmore

The

Stravinsky Project

Deconstructing the “inventor of music”

By Kathleen Wheaton

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Igor Stravinsky in London, 1965. Russian composer, pianist, and conductor, widely acknowledged as one of the most important and influential composers of 20th century music. (1882-1971)

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gor Stravinsky (18821971), the Russianborn pianist and composer and towering figure of 20th-century sound, described himself as “an inventor of music.” His 1910 “Firebird Suite” and 1913 “Rite of Spring,” sparked riots at their respective premieres then went on to become musical touchstones for such disparate performers as Charlie Parker and The Who, as well as part of the soundtrack of the Disney film Fantasia.

An accidental exile, he found himself in Paris on the eve of the Russian Revolution and in New York at the beginning of World War II. He was the prototype of the modern international celebrity, the Andy Warhol of his era, wooing Coco Chanel and dining at the Kennedy White House. In the decade he lived in Hollywood, he hobnobbed with George Balanchine, Aldous Huxley and Dylan Thomas. A devoted father of four and a devout Russian Orthodox, he also conducted an open, decades-long affair with a dancer while his wife, Katerina, was ill with tuberculosis. He became a citizen of France and the U.S. and, by his request, was buried in Venice. But where did he and, by extension, his music, really come from?

Cultural historian Joseph Horowitz addresses these and other questions with the Stravinsky Project, presented by Strathmore in conjuction with Post-Classical Ensemble, at Strathmore, Georgetown University and the National Gallery. The project is co-produced by Strathmore and Post-Classical Ensemble and is supported in part by the National Endowment for

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vinsky is “kaleidoscopic.” There is “East and West and everything in between.

Also the severe weather: hot and cold.

The exuberance of dance, the sorrow.”

Toradze will join the Russian pianist Genadi Zagor, Georgian pianist George Vatchnadze, and Vakhtang Kodanashvili and Edisher Savitski, both Soviet-born Georgians, in performances at Strathmore. The Soviet-born musicians, Horowitz says, “hear this music differently than we do, and they play it differently than we do. It’s earthy. It’s raw. It’s visceral. It’s Russian.”

The Post-Classical Ensemble will be joined by the pianists and The Washington Bach Chorus for a Friday evening performance featuring Stravinsky’s Symphonies for Wind Instruments, Concerto for Piano and Winds, Les Noces (“The Wedding”) and the D.C. premiere of “Danse Sacrale” from The Rite of Spring for 4 hand piano and percussion.

The festival also features a Stravinsky film day at the National Gallery, and a conference, “Stravinsky and the Theater,” at Georgetown University.

On Sunday, two events at Strathmore complete the weekend festival. First, in the Mansion, “Interpreting Stravinsky” is a multi-disciplinary concert/exhibition/ lecture which features a pianola performance by Rex Lawson (the American premiere of Stravinsky’s pianola version of Les Noces); Russian-born photographer Katya Chilingiri will show and discuss her exhibition, The Stravinsky Odyssey, photographs of houses where Stravinsky lived as well as photographs of his relatives and descendants—all bearing the composer’s narrow, intelligent face and large, protruding eyes; and a lecture/concert which challenges Stravinsky’s strictures “against interpretation.”

The final concert in the Music Center is a tour-de-force of Stravinsky pieces for piano with Vatchnadze, Zagor and Toradze. The Daily Telegraph has described Toradze’s approach to the piano as “no holds barred at the keyboard. My God, you know you’re alive, listening.” 

ellen byrne

the Arts, Asbury Methodist Village and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

As his fame grew, Stravinsky increasingly insisted that he was a man with neither a country nor a past. He downplayed the Russian folk influence on such early compositions as Petrushka, Firebird and Rite of Spring, and declared his later neoclassical pieces to be mere “musical objects.” Music, he said, “is by its very nature powerless to express anything.” He embraced the player piano, or pianola, because the machine dispensed with the unpredictability of humans. Musicians have tended to take Stravinsky at his word, and interpret his compositions with the severity his minimalist notations appeared to decree.

But recent scholarship has turned the idea of Stravinsky as a musical automaton on its head. Horowitz, author of Artists in Exile: How Refugees from War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts, says that far from irrelevant, exile was a defining element of Stravinsky’s psychology. “Here was a guy who falsified his past—lying wouldn’t be too strong a word,” he says.

“He consciously became not-Russian.”

At least he tried. In his book, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, Richard Taruskin writes that the composer’s misrepresentation of himself is rooted in “an astonishing, chronic sense of cultural inferiority.” While scholars have been researching and rethinking Stravinsky, Russian musicians have been discovering his music, much of which was ignored in the Soviet era, derided as degenerate Western nonsense.

“Stravinsky,” Soviet-born pianist Alexander Toradze says, “is as Russian as it gets.” Toradze, who defected to the U.S. in 1983, is largely responsible for bringing the “new Stravinsky” to Western audiences, via performances such as his triumphant Stravinsky Piano Concerto with the Berlin Philharmonic in 2010. A burly, athletic musician who has sustained injuries from his playing, Toradze says that like Russia itself Stra-

THE STRAVINSKY PROJECT Events

Stravinsky Remixed: Concert and Symposium Friday, April 8, 2011 at 1:15P.M. Georgetown University, McNeir Hall Stravinsky’s Russian Accent Friday, April 8, 2011 at 8:00 P.M. Music Center at Strathmore Stravinsky On Film Saturday, April 9, 2011, 1-7P.M. The National Gallery Interpreting Stravinsky Sunday, April 10, 2011 at 12P.M. Mansion at Strathmore Stravinsky and the Piano Sunday, April 10, 2011 at 4P.M. Music Center at Strathmore applause at Strathmore • March 2011 11

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