Igor Stravinsky – The Rite of Spring – Piano Four Hands Version (1913)

My dad recently got a CD of Benjamin Frith and Peter Hill playing Stravinsky’s music for piano four hands, and he’s been singing the praises of the composer’s reduction of The Rite of Spring, saying that it’s like hearing the piece in black-and-white, that its surface detail recedes into the background and its architecture is suddenly more apparent. Today I finally listened to it, and I have to say that I’m not convinced. While it is interesting to hear how much the piece changes when it’s played on a monochrome decaying instrument rather than a kaleidoscopic collection of sustaining instruments, I don’t think most of those changes are for the better. The piece’s most texturally spare passages make the transition well: the very opening and the middle of the introduction to the second half (with those slow, interleaved, chromatic quarter-note trumpet* figures, later augmented by ominous rising flute* and clarinet* arpeggios) seem like they could be excerpts from lost piano pieces by Debussy, Ravel or Prokofiev. But the louder, denser passages, especially in “Dance of the Earth,” “Glorification of the Chosen One” and “Sacrificial Dance,” basically turn into mush. (Though maybe that’s partially the pianists’ fault: I have a recording of Frith doing Mendelssohn piano concerti and I’m not at all impressed by it.) There are also passages where I miss the particular orchestral timbres Stravinsky chose too much to enjoy the defamiliarization effect provided by the rearrangement, sometimes for reasons of sonic clarity — the moment in the introduction where the texture is suddenly reduced to a folky oboe* tune over a wild alto flute* mini-cadenza makes absolutely no sense on piano — but often because I have to disagree with my dad’s claim that the reduction clarifies the piece’s architecture. On the contrary, I would say that the orchestration is often the primary carrier of structural information, the most striking example being the beginning of “Evocation of the Ancestors,” which is startling and joyous when it involves the entrance of the brass section, but rather muted and unremarkable when it’s just more piano chords. Oh well. It’s worth remembering that Stravinsky made this arrangement for rehearsing with the dancers and never intended it to be listened to independently. The solo piano arrangments of three sections from Pétrouchka (yeah, I mentioned it again), which was actually written as a concert piece, works a lot better.

* Note: I don’t have the score for the orchestral version on me, so I may be misremembering or mishearing some of these instrumentations.

Igor Stravinsky – Renard (1916)

This project gets off to a bit of a random start with a couple of pieces I want to listen to before I have to return the CDs to the library.  First up is Stravinsky’s chamber opera Renard, based on a set of Russian folk tales involving a sly fox and his attempts to lure a hen to her death.  Since I checked it out in order to study Stravinsky’s cimbalom writing, I didn’t bother checking whether I had a translation of the text.  Turns out I don’t:  the score has it in Russian, French and German but not English, and the CD has the entire text of Walton’s Façade but nothing for Renard.  I could translate the French or German with a dictionary, but I’m not sure how much it matters, since the singers sit with the orchestra and don’t represent specific characters (the narrative is handled by costumed dancers on stage), and at this point in his career Stravinsky saw music as an objective, sonic-cerebral art incapable of containing emotional content.

Stylistically, the piece is very close to Les Noces (1923):  a chamber orchestra plays percussive, mechanistic music while a group of singers evoke Russian folk singing with leaps from grace notes.  The music is largely modal, with occasional chromatic intrusions;  like a lot of Stravinsky’s music in the 1910s, it places a lot of emphasis on the tetrachord formed by the first four notes of the minor scale.  It’s put together in big blocks of contrasting material, often with abrupt tempo and pitch-collection changes between them;  each of these blocks itself consists of repeated and juxtaposed melodic cells.  The meters tend to be regularly irregular:  the opening march, for example, alternates between 2/4 and 3/4.  The instruments generally work together as one enormous super-instrument rather than playing in counterpoint, although there is a passage in the middle of the piece where the winds and brass start doing little neoclassical canons over a motoric ostinato string part — a moment that’s particularly striking because the canonized figure features an eighth-note septuplet, which as far as I can remember is an exceptionally rare rhythmic gesture in Stravinsky’s music.

Most of what I just wrote could be applied to just about any Stravinsky piece from the period, and that’s partially because Renard doesn’t really stand out that much from his other pieces.  There are some great moments, to be sure — the canonic bit I mentioned above, a cadence on an unexpectedly sweet major third in the scene where the fox is dressed up as a nun and trying to lure the hen with promises of spiritual absolution (!), and a great melody toward the end of the piece that flips rapidly between major and minor.  But all in all it feels like a pale shadow of what was to come in Les Noces, a piece that, to my ears at least, is much more obviously the work of a visionary.  Maybe that’s just history talking — Stravinsky’s rhythmic and formal innovations must have still been pretty startling in 1916, especially since the piece lacks both the lush orchestration and violent dramatic intensity of The Rite of Spring (1913), and the quirky humor and stylistic quotations of Pétrouchka (1911) — that is, the elements that made those pieces accessible.  But if you know the history, it’s hard to un-hear it, and I’m not sure that it’s even desirable to.

As for the cimbalom, it’s a neat instrument — kind of perpetually out-of-tune-sounding — but it’s not featured that prominently in the piece after the first five minutes or so.  Next up is Andriessen’s Mausoleum (1979), so we’ll see if he takes better advantage of the instrument.