Music

Having been playing Stravinsky’s Four Études for Orchestra, my main reaction has been: what? Here’s some background. Despite the title, these were never orchestral studies. Three are orchestrations of his Three Pieces for String Quartet (1914). The fourth, Madrid, began as an Étude for Pianola (1917), written for a player piano. Its score needs six staves, three pianists’ worth of notes, because no human was supposed to play it. In 1928 Stravinsky gave all four titles and an orchestra; Ansermet premiered them in Berlin in 1930. So we’re playing music written for four soloists and a machine. ...

Dawn. Kashchei’s soul is destroyed, the spell breaks, and the captives come back to life. A solo horn plays a folk tune over quiet strings, the most famous tune in the ballet. It passes through the orchestra and grows each time. Then the brass take it in 7/4, every note given its own weight, and the suite ends in a blaze of B major. The 7/4 is the trick. The tune began in a lilting triple meter. Stretched into seven beats, it stops being a song and becomes a procession. Same tune, new body. ...

After the Infernal Dance, a lullaby. The monsters have collapsed, and the Firebird puts Kashchei to sleep. The bassoon gets the tune, a lazy, swaying one, over rocking harp and hushed strings. The bassoon is usually the orchestra’s comedian. Here it sings, low and alone, and it’s one of the loveliest things in the piece. The movement doesn’t end. It thins to a quiet string tremolo and hangs there, and the Finale grows out of it without a break. Kashchei sleeps; we wait. ...

The Infernal Dance opens with one enormous chord from the whole orchestra. Anyone who dozed off during the Khorovod is now awake. The plot: the Firebird enchants Kashchei and his monsters and makes them dance until they collapse. The music is built on syncopation. The accents land off the beat, the low brass and bassoons stamp out the theme, and the xylophone rattles on top. I’ve complained before about how hard it is to play together. ...

The captive princesses dance a khorovod, a slow Russian round dance. After two movements of magic, finally a tune. The solo oboe plays it first. It’s a real folk song, one Rimsky-Korsakov had already used in his Sinfonietta on Russian Themes. The student borrowed from the teacher’s shelf. The rule of the score is clearest here. Supernatural music is chromatic; human music is diatonic, plain and singable. The princesses are prisoners of a demon, but their music hasn’t heard. The woodwinds pass the tune around over harp and strings, and nothing disturbs it for five minutes. ...

The Firebird arrives. Strings and woodwinds shimmer, and the high woodwinds throw in short, bright interjections, like light catching feathers. Then her variation: flutes, piccolo and clarinets in flurries, trills and leaps, never settling on a tune. That is the characterization. Kashchei’s music is chromatic and creeping; the Firebird’s is chromatic and fast. Both are magic, and neither gets a melody. Melodies are for humans, and the humans arrive tomorrow. ...

This week: The Firebird suite, the 1919 version, one movement a day. I’ve written about the suite and Doráti’s complete ballet before. This time, slowly. Stravinsky made three concert suites from the ballet, in 1911, 1919 and 1945. The 1919 is the one orchestras play. It uses less than half the ballet and a much smaller orchestra: double winds instead of quadruple, one harp instead of three. Stravinsky himself called the original orchestra “wastefully large.” Fewer players, more performances. The LA Phil calls the suites “a savvy financial move”. ...

After a month of hearing Pictures at an Exhibition from the piccolo seat, here’s a better recording, to correct things and actually understand the music: Edo de Waart and the Rotterdam Philharmonic, in Ravel’s orchestration, recorded in 1974. Very well balanced, very well executed. The pleasant surprise is that the album also includes Mussorgsky’s original piano version, played by Misha Dichter. So you get both: what Mussorgsky wrote, and what Ravel made of it. ...

The University of Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s annual Halloween concert. I was a mango. A lot of mistakes, and even more enthusiasm. I think the concert had good vibes thanks to the costumes, and we need good practice.

A rare CSO night where every piece was good. Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider conducted: Nielsen: Overture to Maskarade Dvořák: Cello Concerto in B minor, with Jian Wang Tchaikovsky: selections from The Sleeping Beauty Jian Wang in the Dvořák. The Nielsen is light and cute, a good way to open. Then the Dvořák, sweet to the point of excess. The recipe: take a handful of folk-flavored tunes, write variations on them, stack them up, and voilà, the most popular cello concerto ever written. Wang played it with style and attitude, and it came out refreshing rather than syrupy. ...