Here are three ‘difficult’ late works by Igor Stravinsky. Much
has been written on the subject of Stravinsky’s late move towards
serialism, but the reasons are as numerous and simple as they
are complex and enigmatic. With Schoenberg dead, Stravinsky presumably
no longer felt the hot breath of his Hollywood neighbour over
his shoulder. A dodecaphonic approach appealed to the rigorous
neatness and order which Stravinsky had always applied to his
work, his inventiveness was under strain by the 1940s and he needed
fresh stimulus. As well as this, he could remain part of the avant-garde
in terms of the how he was regarded by the music world which,
wanting him preserved as an old and respectable master, responded
with shock and horror. Stravinsky was a consummate professional,
and would long have been aware of these kinds of compositional
techniques. In all probability, while tinkering with the 12-tone
palette Stravinsky found he could re-invent himself and still
remain true to his personal sound, with surprising ease, as it
turned out, though not without some rather dodgy or misunderstood
pieces being created along the way.
There are surprising
moments and movements of atonal strangeness in these pieces,
but recognisable Stravinsky ‘fingerprints’ of instrumental colour
and rhythmic integrity always keep things together. Canticum
Sacrum is filled with passion as Agon is with wit,
and anyone who can cope with ‘Les noces’ will in fact find this
a relatively easy ride.
The Canticum
Sacrum belongs to the category of pieces in which Stravinsky
expressed his return, or desire to return to the Russian Orthodox
faith. The work’s dedication to Venice is in part reflected
in the structure of the piece, which matches the architecture
and floor plan of St. Mark’s Cathedral. The work was performed
in this vast Venetian acoustic in 1956, and one can only imagine
the nightmare this must have created when trying to get the
thing to sound even remotely coherent. In this recording the
tricky solos and chamber-music accompanied movements are performed
with great aplomb by Rudolf Rosen and Christian Elsner, and
of the instruments only the sound of the organ is a little lifeless,
though I’ve probably been listening to too many baroque and
French instruments of late. Any Stravinsky collector with any
sense will already have snapped up the big 22
disc box from Sony, but even with the composer on the conductor’s
rostrum the recording in this must-have set is rather constricted,
and more grim in tone than the music warrants. This recording
was done not long after the premiere, and still sounds rather
uncertain and exploratory in places. It has great historical
value, but for this work’s glorious unfolding and fascinating
labyrinthine structures, Gielen and his team are hard to beat.
Agon is dedicated
to George Balanchine, and received its stage premiere with the
New York Ballet. It’s score is something of a patchwork of twelve-tone
and more ‘conventionally’ constructed tonal movements, moments
from which seem to hark back a little to ‘The Rake’s Progress’
or even Milhaud’s ‘Création du Monde’, others showing the way
for composers like Tippett. The ‘suite’ nature of the sections
and formal nature of some of the set pieces comes from Stravinsky’s
use of the kind of stylisation to be found in seventeenth century
dance instruction books. Looking for comparison recordings I
rooted out a CD I’d had knocking around for years, the Melbourne
Symphony Orchestra under Hiroyuki Iwaki on Virgin Classics,
but discovered it to be rather lacking in the essential detail
required for this work. Stravinsky’s own 1964 recording is of
course a classic. Despite some ragged ensemble and uncertain
playing here and there this recording is full of zing and pep,
and stands on its own for more than merely historical interest.
Agon also appears on Michael Tilson Thomas’s ‘Stravinsky
in America’ album, and is well played by the London Symphony
Orchestra, though not with the agility and refinement of Gielen’s
SWR forces. Tilson Thomas has his tympani weigh in with full
force for instance, where Gielen asks for a more proportionate
contribution to far greater musical effect. The SWR musicians
give far more the impression of chamber-music light footedness
– surely a plus in a work for ballet. This is by far the most
attractive recording I’ve ever heard of this sometimes problematic
and certainly virtuosic work.
The last piece in
this programme is the Requiem Canticles, Stravinsky’s
last major piece. I have to admit to having the Robert Craft
conducted/Stravinsky supervised recording firmly imprinted onto
my mental hard disc, so deviations from this golden mean are
harder to take. I suppose I would have liked Gielen to have
been a little more intense and compact in the opening, but the
choral sound is marvellous, and the impact of the Dies irae
is tremendous. The soloists are excellent, the very secure
sounding Rudolf Rosen in the Tuba mirum reflected in
Stravinsky’s structural mirror by mezzo-soprano Stella Doufexis
in the Rex tremendae. The central Interlude has
a knocking, funereal tread which moved me considerably, and
that killing wide vibrato in the flutes has thankfully been
knocked out of the players in this performance. The ‘crowd scene’
of the Libera me is highly animated and deeply chilling.
The only movement which disappoints is the final Postlude,
whose chiming bells surely deserve more space in which to develop
their resonance. This is a movement which has raised the hairs
on my neck since before I had hairs on my neck, and I’m afraid
my hackles remained flat as a dab – shame.
Despite my one or
two quibbles, which are of a subjective and personal nature,
this recording has to be regarded as a triumph. In a truly musical
fashion, Michael Gielen seems effortlessly to have warmly embraced
these three late masterpieces, rendering them into powerfully
expressive classics rather than ‘problem children’. Admittedly,
there are other Stravinsky works which create harder tasks in
this direction, and Gielen might profitably examine such pieces
with a view to dragging them, no doubt kicking and screaming,
into the 21st century. Norman Lebrecht has remarked
that, despite Stravinsky’s great achievements, he distanced
himself from his own pain and passion, describing it in others
but concealing it in himself. With the Requiem Canticles
the composer kept a kind of elegiac diary, pasting the obituaries
of friends and acquaintances into his sketchbook, those who
died as he worked on the piece. Whether he was spurring himself
on at the end of his own days, moved by the inexorable grind
of time and fate or just keeping himself in the mood for writing
a requiem, at least we come as close as we are ever likely to
in seeing Stravinsky tuning himself as directly as possible
into human emotion and transience. This quality of recording,
interpretation and performance can be seen as a path to enlightenment
when it comes to these kinds of works, and listeners who have
shied away from them in the past will do well in discovering
them here.
Dominy Clements