Igor Stravinsky: Orchestral Works

This disc ushers in the 60th anniversary of the Stuttgarter Kammerorchester, whose long and distinguished history includes a 16 year association (so far) with Dennis Russell Davies. The productive collaboration between the resourceful American conductor and Germany’s oldest chamber orchestra led to Davies’ appointment as Chief Conductor in 1995. Dennis Russell Davies has directed the orchestra in a number of important recordings including ECM albums with music of Kancheli, Shostakovich, Vasks, Schnittke, Hindemith, Britten, Pendericki, and Mozart. The list is an index of the orchestra’s flexibility, in evidence again on their account of Stravinsky’s “Orchestral Works”. Davies, at home in all musical periods, is an apt Stravinsky interpreter. As the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote last year, “There can hardly be a more multi-faceted conductor at the beginning of the 21st century… Inquisitive, hard-working…. His conducting style is animated by an ideal chamber-music transparency and a fine sense of tone colour.”

In the recently published “Penguin Companion to Classical Music”, Paul Griffiths refers to Igor Stravinsky as “the least known of the great composers”. A master composer, many of whose works are self-contained worlds, and whose inspiration and ingenuity continually led to new ideas and to new ways of viewing music’s past as well as its present, Stravinsky resists glib summary. Considerations of the composer as the detached ironist or the neo-classicist – or the firebrand of the Firebird years – tell such a small part of the story. The output is vast, and it is inflected in so many different ways.

But there is a changing awareness of the composer’s central importance in the contemporary musical landscape. Stravinsky’s “borrowings” from other styles, his “hybrid” impulse, once presented a problem for adherents of the Schoenberg school. As Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich writes, “Stravinsky’s apparent indifference to musical material remained a thorn in the side of determined modernists – his predilection for using and exploiting old models and thus to put it superficially, for remoulding or retreading rather than inventing.” But in modulating from one “historical colouring” into another, Stravinsky is now seen to be ahead of his time, laying the groundwork for post-modern music and a “polystylism” reflected in the music of composers as different as Schnittke, Zimmermann and Silvestrov.

Nonetheless, few other composers have been able to make use of both the old and the new so persuasively, and references in the pieces selected here – written between 1927 and 1960 – range from Bach and the madrigals of Gesualdo to Webern. Stravinsky laughingly described his borrowings, subtle and overt, as “a rare form of kleptomania”, but the sources are always transformed. Featured compositions, presented in approximate reverse chronology, are the “Momentum pro Gesualdo di Venosa ad CD annum” (1960), the “Danses Concertantes” for chamber orchestra (1942), the Concerto in D for string orchestra (1946), and the ballet music “Apollon Musagète” (1927), created for his collaboration with choreographer Georges Ballanchine.

Other aspects of Stravinsky’s music are addressed in ECM’s Spring 2005 schedule. This album of orchestral music by one of the iconic figures of 20th century composition is released simultaneously with Leonidas Kavakos and Péter Nagy’s duo recital juxtaposing Stravinsky and Johann Sebastian Bach. Later in the season, ECM will release a piano recital record by Alexei Lubimov, including Stravinsky’s “Serenade”.