The Russian Stravinsky

What happened to Stravinsky in the West? What to make of his “neo-classicism”? These are questions I’ve many times pondered in this space.

The superb Soviet-trained musicians who belatedly discovered Stravinsky’s post-Russian odyssey have certainly heard his music with different ears. The most extreme case I know is that of my great friend Alexander Toradze, for whom Stravinsky is at all times “Russian.” You can glean the same re-understanding from the Stravinsky performances of his longtime collaborator Valery Gergiev.

The latest evidence is the latest “PostClassical” webcast: an astounding performance of Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Winds with Toradze and PostClassical Ensemble conducted by Angel Gil-Ordóñez. Toradze’s extensive commentary takes issue with the composer’s own instructions. 

The many stories at hand include Lexo’s onstage meeting with Ella Fitzgerald in Portland, Oregon, in 1978, as a touring Soviet artist, and his stunning recollections of Stravinsky’s 1962 encounter with the legendary Soviet pianist Maria Yudina. He also shares his religious reading of the Piano Concerto’s slow movement as a “duality” of Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox influences.

Angel and I join Lexo alongside our usual host, the inimitable Bill McGlaughlin. Listen here.

For more Toradze — a fabulous film — click here.

LISTENING GUIDE:

5:00 – Stravinsky speaks: “music can express nothing” and cannot be “interpreted” – his neo-classical credo, formulated in Paris after World War I.

6:00 – A 1928 recording by Stravinsky and his son Soulima of Mozart’s C minor Fugue embodies the radically impersonal aesthetic Stravinsky now embraced; I call it “insolently impersonal.”

8:30 – Toradze remembers Stravinsky’s own performance of The Firebird in Moscow (1962) as “very uninteresting.” In his edition of Stravinsky’s Piano Sonata (published after the composer’s death), Soulima contradicted his father and embraced expressive “interpretation.” Toradze understands Stravinsky’s strictures against interpretation as a strategy for counteracting traditional piano styles rooted in Romantic repertoire (Liszt, Chopin, etc.). He recalls that, in Russia in 1962, Stravinsky testified that he always “dreamt in Russian.”

23:00 – We sample Stravinsky’s own 1968 recording of the Piano Concerto (with Philippe Entremont). Toradze finds the opening Largo too fast; he endorses the original tempo marking: “Largissimo.” He argues that composers are sometimes self-consciously constrained performing their own music, and cites Rachmaninoff as an example.

32:00 – Movement 1 of the Stravinsky Concerto, with Toradze and Angel Gil-Ordóñez is conducting PostClassical Ensemble (2011)

40:00 – The influence of jazz on Stravinsky and Toradze. During Toradze’s student years in Moscow, American jazz was “food for the soul”; it created the illusion “that’s what [American] freedom is about.” 

54:00 – In 1978, on tour in Portland, Oregon, Toradze met Ella Fitzgerald and told her (onstage) that she was “a goddess” in the Soviet Union.

57:00 – In Toradze’s religious reading of the second movement of the Stravinsky Concerto, a “duality” of Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox musical influences interact. Stravinsky, in France, believed his bleeding finger was cured by a religious miracle.

1:05 – Movement 2 of the Stravinsky Concerto, with Toradze and Gil-Ordóñez

1:20 – Movement 3 of the Stravinsky Concerto, with Toradze and Gil-Ordóñez

1:25 – Toradze remembers the Russian pianist Maria Yudina, “a colossal figure” who long championed Stravinsky in the USSR. She first heard the Stravinsky Concerto performed by Seymour Lipkin, Leonard Bernstein, and the NY Philharmonic on tour in Moscow in 1959. She met Stravinsky in Moscow in 1962 and was dismayed to discover him susceptible to “photo opportunities and journalists.” 

We close by sampling Yudina’s 1962 recording of the Stravinsky Concerto, conducted by Genadi Rozhdestvensky.