Igor Stravinsky, a brief story / "Firebird" ballet - Finale

Igor Feodorovich Stravinsky was the third of four children of a famous singer of the Russian Imperial Opera and a mother to whom he "only felt duties", according to his own confession. His siblings bored him to the extreme, so little Igor had to manage to find a note of joviality in an oppressive childhood. His only joy seemed to come from the care of his wet nurse, whom he kept an emotional memory of all his life and whom he mourned more than his own mother when she died.

The Music, or the Law
Fortunately, the family's musical evenings provided a fruitful breath of life and encouraged his taste for music. At the age of 9, he began his first piano lessons, and at 11 he was dazzled when he attended the opera for the first time. Soon after, he was present at the premiere of Tchaikovsky's Pathétique Symphony, and this time, he was spellbound. At the same time, he was composing his first pieces. Everything seemed to be going wonderfully for the young Igor to make music a career. Still, the ominous fate of the young Russian musical promises stood before him and he had to enter the Faculty of Law at the age of eighteen.

The master Nicolai
Only his acquaintance with the composer Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov saved him from his juridical fate. Although he frowned upon his first works, he finally took him into his home for three years to teach him the trade, introducing him to musical forms and their language, and supporting him in the orchestration of his own piano scores. Master Nicolai, perhaps unwittingly, thus became the only musician from whom Stravinsky later acknowledged having learned something.

Igor Stravinsky (1882 - 1971)

Meeting Diaghilev
The year 1908 he already had several scores to his credit, applauded by the public and critics. All that was missing was a bit of luck. This came in the form of a concert where two of his works were performed and attended by an attentive spectator, Sergei Diaghilev, the creator of the Ballets Russes, the latest sensation in Paris at the time. Sergei did not delay in asking Stravinsky to orchestrate Chopin's music for a projected future ballet to be called The Sylphides.

The Firebird
Igor was happier than ever. Even so, he did not imagine that celebrity was just around the corner and that he was going to conquer it overnight. Indeed, in the late summer of 1909, he received a telegram from Diaghilev commissioning him to write the score for the ballet The Firebird, scheduled for the next season of the Ballets Russes. Despite the short deadline granted, Igor completed the work on time, which premiered on June 25 of that year at the Paris Opera, not without some setbacks. The frenetic rhythm of the music unsettled some dancers, so much so that the famous Anna Pavlova refused to dance "such barbarities". Tamara Karsavina (in the "photo") had to replace her.

Le tout Paris was immediately seduced by Stravinsky's music and by the costumes and the innovative sets of the staging. The dazzling and enchanting music of the young 28-year-old master will greatly influence the choreographic activity, revitalizing an art that seemed exhausted, due to so many pas de deux. The Firebird will put an end to them forever, taking the tutus with him in passing.

Listening "with other ears"

The rendition, as a suite for orchestra, is by the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Pierre Boulez, and features the last tableaux: Danza Infernal, Berceuse, and Finale (the whole ballet lasts fifty minutes, circa).
One last word. It is not easy to distinguish in this music tunes that can be hummed, but as it is already more than one hundred years old, I think it is time to make an effort to listen to it "with other ears". To do so, we should abandon for a few minutes the sonorous and harmonic schemes of the 19th century and earlier.

Igor Stravinski, the pianist / Petrushka - Three Movements / Yuja Wang

For a Russian composer temporarily settled in Paris in 1921 and facing the rigors of the post-war period, the offer of five thousand francs for the composition of a piano piece was not negligible. That was the sum the piano virtuoso Arthur Rubinstein promised Igor Stravinsky for a Russian character piece in which he could display his grandiose technique.

Three Movements from Petrushka

Stravinsky recalled the pieces he had sketched in 1911 for an orchestral piece with prominent piano participation, which he had reoriented into a ballet at the behest of Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev. Those sketches and excerpts from the ballet eventually formed the solo piano piece Three Movements of Petrushka, ten years after the debut of the successful ballet starring Petrushka, the puppet that comes to life, in the Russian tradition.

Stravinsky, the pianist

Rubinstein, the dedicatee of the work, was highly pleased with it, performing it on numerous occasions. Of course, he was also interested in making known the piano work of the Russian composer, whom, until today, we do not easily relate to piano writing, although Stravinsky was an extremely talented pianist who, during most of his adult life, devoted half of each year to giving concerts and the other half to composing.

The Path
Prior to the undertaking that culminated in the Three Movements, the future author of The Rite of Spring and The Firebird had surprised musical circles in his twenties with a piano sonata in 1903. Then came, in 1908, the Four Studies of opus 7, which already showed maturity and a piano language full of promise. But the significant new contribution to the piano will come in 1921 with this brilliant "reduction" of the ballet Petrushka, plagued with difficulties, and which, despite the nearly one hundred years since its invention, is still today among the most "spectacular" works of the piano repertoire.

The three movements

The work is known for its enormous technical and musical difficulties. Almost without respite, they capture its three movements with a great display of polyrhythm, extensive and fast jumps, very fast scales, as well as glissandos and tremolos everywhere. Its parts are:

00:00  No 1 Danse russe (Russian Dance)

02:29  No 2 Chez Pétrouchka  (Petrushka's Room)

06:48  No 3 La semaine grasse (The Shrovetide Fair)

The rendition, dazzling, is by the brilliant pianist Yuja Wang.

Mozart, Horn Concerto 3 in E-flat major

The horn, or French horn, is one of the wind instruments that the child Mozart heard more than once at home, in Salzburg, when Leopold met with his friends to make chamber music. From then on he loved its timbre, which, together with the flute or the oboe, was more "pastoral" than the harpsichord or even the stringed instruments. And from that time, too, dates his closeness to Joseph Leutgeb, the most skilled horn player of his time, an essential guest in the evenings Leopold organized at his home in Getreidegasse.

The enterprising "horn man"
The four horn concertos composed by Mozart in Vienna between 1783 and 1791 are dedicated to Leutgeb. The horn player had left his position in the Salzburg court orchestra in 1771 to start a commercial "venture" in Vienna in his forties. It was a store specializing in cheese and related foodstuffs, but as the story goes, without giving up music altogether. The venture was partially financed by Leopold through a loan that Leutgeb was never able to repay, despite the continuous reminders of the debt that Mozart read in the letters he received from his father. The horn player had failed, irretrievably, but Wolfgang was there to support him and return him to music.

Wolfgang, the playful one

The friendship and affection professed were great. But this does not detract from the fact that, in the vein that characterized the Salzburg genius from childhood, he made healthy fun – if one can say so – of the unsuccessful entrepreneur. Surprising – to say the least – are the singular invectives in Italian that Mozart allowed himself to intersperse in the autograph pages of the four concertos. He called him a thousand names: seccatura di coglione, trillo di pecore, porco infame, are a few of them. Leutgeb did not take it badly. He understood that the brilliant son of his friend Leopold was having fun with him, not at his expense.

Horn Concerto No. 3 in E-flat major, K. 447
The four horn concertos (plus a quintet he composed later for horn and strings - K. 407) are masterpieces for the instrument, brilliant and solid, which enriched horn music, not very abundant at the time. The concerto K. 447 in E flat major is the third that Mozart composed for Leutgeb. Its solo parts abound in passages that are quite a challenge for the interpreter, even more so if one considers the precariousness of the instrument of the time.

Movements:
00:00  Allegro
08:10  Romanza. Larghetto
12:54  Allegro

The performance is by the Czech instrumentalist Radek Baborák, accompanied by the RTVE Orchestra, under the baton of the Russian-born French conductor Jean Jacques Kantorow.

Anton Rubinstein, Piano Concerto No 4

The pianist who succeeded Liszt in the line of greatness was called Anton Grigorievich Rubinstein, a Russian bear with enormous hands who, with his luxuriant hair and broad forehead in the Beethoven style, dazzled the audience, especially the ladies, in the second half of the 19th century. At sixteen he had played for Liszt but the Hungarian master did not take him as a pupil. Perhaps their personalities clashed. Liszt is said to have dismissed him with good advice: "A talented man should reach his goal by his own efforts, without any help". No other brilliant pupil is known to have been rejected by the master.

Anton Rubinstein (1829 - 1894)

His career

Born in 1829 in a village northwest of Odessa, he made his debut at the age of nine. Soon his teacher took him to Paris where he dazzled as a child prodigy. But he was not the only one. As he would later recount in his autobiography, child prodigies were all the rage throughout Europe in the 1840s.

Later it was Berlin, then Vienna. In 1872-73 he made a professionally and financially successful tour of the United States. Ten years earlier he had participated in the founding of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, of which he was the first director (his younger brother, Nikolai, another piano virtuoso, founded the Moscow Conservatory in 1866).

The Legacy

At the end of his life, his enormous repertoire was weakened, but he still continued with his famous "historical recitals", in which during seven recitals he covered the entire history of Western music. Like every professional pianist of the 19th century, he was also a prolific composer. His legacy is extensive, although much of it has been forgotten. There are twenty operas, six symphonies, chamber music, and innumerable pieces for solo piano. Of his five concertos for piano and orchestra, only one survives, the Concerto in D minor, still hailed today, and an integral part of the standard repertoire, at least in Russia.

Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 4 in D minor, opus 70

Perhaps a masterpiece of the 19th-century repertoire, it was composed in 1864 and published two years later, together with an arrangement for two pianos. And it is not difficult to understand the success it enjoyed in its time (what is hard to understand is that it has lost it). His writing is colorful and at times dazzling. Of great melodic and harmonic appeal, it also displays a highly imaginative orchestration. 

Movements

The three typical ones of the period (although they were not so typical anymore - apart from the fact that the first movement is "somewhat moderate", and not overtly fast):

00:00  Moderato assai

11:31  Andante

22:18  Allegro

The rendition is by pianist Age Juurikas, from Estonia, accompanied by the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the Estonian maestro Neeme Järvi.

Beethoven, Symphony No. 1 in C major

Beethoven composed his first symphony at the age of 30, an age at which Mozart had composed most (around 33) of his 41 symphonies. Schubert himself, too, died at the age of 31, leaving a very respectable collection of nine symphonies. What sets the distances apart is that what the Bonn master was about to accomplish in the genre was monumental. In the First Symphony (also in the second) his writing will still be marked by the classical aesthetics of the end of the century, but with it comes a new air that will hatch four years later with the Third Symphony, called Eroica. From then on, there will be no parallel.

But there is no need to dramatize it either. It has often been insisted on the particular beginning of the Symphony in C major -giving it the character of revolutionary boldness, or premonition-, because it opens in a key other than the tonic. Indeed, the introductory adagio begins in F instead of C major (more precisely, the work opens with a seventh of C that immediately resolves in F). But this being a characteristic of Haydn's late works, we believe that the purpose of its application by Beethoven responds more to a sort of homage to the master, to his master, whom he revered, rather than to any other revolutionary motive.

Symphony No. 1 in C major, op 21

The work was composed in Vienna, between 1799-1800, and premiered at the Burgtheater on April 2, 1800. Beethoven had already written his first two piano concertos and a couple of cantatas, but the master is known more as a virtuoso pianist than as a composer. This, his first symphony, is the work that will point the way toward the composition of the great purely orchestral works.
And he does it in the midst of pain. The pain that arises when he learns that his growing deafness may not be cured. This is what he tells in a letter to his friend Karl Amenda in June 1800, two months after the premiere:

"...You must know that one of my most precious faculties, that of hearing, is become very defective; even while you were still with me I felt indications of this, though I said nothing; but it is now much worse. Whether I shall ever be cured remains yet to be seen; it is supposed to proceed from the state of my digestive organs, but I am almost entirely recovered in that respect. [...] I hope indeed that my hearing may improve, but I scarcely think so, for attacks of this kind are the most incurable of all. [...] I beg you will keep the fact of my deafness a profound secret, and not confide it to any human being. Write to me frequently; your letters, however short, console and cheer me; so I shall soon hope to hear from you."

Movements:
00        Adagio molto. Allegro con brio
10:33  Andante cantabile con moto.
17:07  Menuetto - Allegro molto e vivace
20:33  Finale - Adagio, allegro molto e vivace

The performance is by the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra conducted by Daniel Barenboim, from the Royal Albert Hall in London (BBC - Proms 2012).