NEC celebrates Stravinsky at 125
This year brings the 125th anniversary of Igor Stravinsky's birth, and New England Conservatory is first out of the gate to recognize the milestone. It offers a mini-festival of Stravinsky concerts Monday through Thursday, with others to follow this spring. Such a celebration is more than welcome; it's needed.
Stravinsky has been anointed the 20th century's greatest composer, by common if not unanimous consent. He has a few competitors -- Schoenberg and Bartok the most serious -- but the case is fairly secure. There are, to start with, his endlessly popular early ballet scores, especially "The Firebird " and "The Rite of Spring, " that mind- and ear-altering cataclysm that stood music on its head in 1913. There are his innovative rhythms and consistently brilliant instrumentation. There is the vast musical terrain he covered, divided conveniently into three periods: the early "Russian" works, the neoclassical period, and the final turn to serialism in his last years. There is the vastness of his influence; everyone from Copland to Poulenc to Steve Reich took something from him.
And while he was alive, there was his sheer star power, an unlikely commodity for a composer to possess. Frank Sinatra, no celebrity hound, asked Stravinsky for his autograph. Charlie Parker once noticed him in a club while Parker was on the bandstand. He promptly quoted "The Firebird" in his solo on "Koko," the 1950s version of a shout-out.
But a major anomaly of our Stravinsky veneration is how little it's really based on. An astonishing amount of his work lies unplayed in concert and infrequently recorded. Sure, "The Firebird" still packs 'em in, and people love his "Symphony of Psalms ." Of the operas, "Oedipus Rex" and "The Rake's Progress " are decently well represented, at least in recordings. But when was the last time you heard "Mavra," the "Ode," "Canticum Sacrum ," or "A Sermon, a Narrative, and a Prayer "? How often are his songs performed? How many know that he wrote works memorializing T.S. Eliot , Dylan Thomas, Aldous Huxley, and John F. Kennedy?
There are rarities from every phase of Stravinsky's career, though probably the majority date from 1950 on. That was when he began to incorporate Schoenberg's 12-tone composing procedures. Many of the resulting compositions are baffling, especially the sacred works, with their stark, ashen tone. It is hard to hear the commonality between, say, "Petrushka " and the late "Requiem Canticles " or "Threni. "
John Heiss , for one, is sure that the connections are there. He is the curator of NEC's festival, one aim of which is to show the unity behind the works of Stravinsky's different periods. "The main point is that he does not change his personal voice," says Heiss, who once won Stravinsky's praise for correcting errors in the parts of one of his works in a rehearsal. "There's the same ping in the articulation, same precision in the gesture, same incredible drive in the rhythms. The farther on we get, the less his career will be perceived as a series of devices and more part of a continuous stream."
That's why the NEC festival includes, among other things, not only the "Firebird" Suite, but such serial works as the Dylan Thomas and JFK elegies and the bright, neoclassical "Concerto in D" for strings. For more, you could also go to recordings. As a conductor, Stravinsky himself recorded many of his own works, and the results used to be available as a 22-CD set from
One way or another, we'll have to come to terms with the unknown territory of the Stravinsky corpus. We can exalt these works as hidden gems, find that they're not worth the time, or rethink what they tell us about his career as a whole. But understanding is the necessary prerequisite.
For more information, visit www.newenglandconservatory.edu/stravinsky
