"Igor Stravinsky enjoyed a lifelong association with the piano. From his earliest childhood works to a few preliminary sketches for a piano sonata left incomplete at the time of his death in 1971, the composer was seldom far from the keyboard. His piano works often serve as harbingers for larger, more familiar compositions. One often sees new contrapuntal patterns, new textural outlays, and new harmonic combinations emerging in a piano work just before appearing in the larger symphonic and choral works. Stravinsky himself referred to the piano as the 'fulcrum' of his compositional devices. The simple truth is that, in comparison to some of the composer's landmark compositions such as 'The Rite of Spring', 'Symphony of Psalms', and the 'Symphony in Three Movements', his piano literature (including the works on this recording) is too often unjustly neglected. Yet each piano work, while significant in itself, also opens new doors to understanding Stravinsky's sustained compositional evolution.
"Stravinsky's setting of the 'Song of the Volga Boatmen', scored for winds and percussion, captures the ancient spirit of a nation that remained unbendingly resilient. Over the years this iconic Russian folksong drew the attention of many composers, Mili Balakirev's arrangement being perhaps the best known. Stravinsky's Swiss exile during the First World War had stirred nostalgic feelings for his lost homeland as evinced in several settings of folks tales he knew as a child. With the 1917 February Revolution fresh in his mind, his memories grew particularly vivid. The composer supposedly prepared the arrangement for the Volga melody as a favour to Sergei Diaghilev. The Ballets Russes impresario needed a new work to replace the traditional playing of the Russian National Anthem 'God Save the Tsar' before performances. But the request for a new anthem actually came directly from the recently instated Russian parliament. Stravinsky's manuscript reveals that he initially entitled the arrangement 'Hymne à la nouvelle Russie'. The composers literally scored the famous song overnight, dictating the music to his friend Ernest Ansermet who dutifully took down every note. Stravinsky added a piano reduction of the work just below the orchestration. The manuscript also includes a coloursful red banner on the cover, sketched by Stravinsky's friend Picasso as an acknowledgement of the Russian Revolution.
"In addition to composing and conducting, Stravinsky assumed the roles of touring concert pianist for the better part of three decades. Written for his own unusually large hands, his piano music is idiosyncratic, and consequently often prodigiously difficult. The composer undertook concertizing with typical fervour. He devoted hours to honing his pianistic skills while also studying with the well-known pedagogue Isidore Philipp. Given his concerns about the excessive 'emotive exploitation' of his works by other interpreters, Stravinsky often retained the exclusive rights to public performance for years before permitting other to play his piano works.
"The Apollonian virtues of neoclassicism's clarity and leannes, to which the composer had been steadily drawn, were made unmistakably evident in his landmark Octet for wind instruments of 1923. Immediately following the Octet came the 'Concerto for piano and wind instruments', wherein the piano takes on a virtuoso concertante roles, partnering an equally important wind ensemble (with no strings other than double basses). The Concerto was written in Biarritz in 1923-4 and dedicated to Natalie Koussevitzky, whose husband, Sergei Koussevitzky, conducted the May 1924 premier in Paris with Stravinsky as the soloist. This three-movement work opens with a 'Largo' written in the style of a French Overture. The stylized dotted rhythms quickly give way to a mechanistic 'Allegro' reminiscent of many of the hard driving movements found among Bach's keyboard Partitas and English Suites. The form of the first movement is somewhat akin to a classical concerto, complete with a developmental middle section that brings to mind the Czerny and Hanon keyboard studies familiar to all budding pianists. The recapitulation leads to a rhythmically complex, jazzy piano cadenza in the style of Gershwin, disclosing just how taken by American jazz, especially ragtime, Stravinsky had become. The movement ends with a return to the opening stately French Overture material.
"The middle movement, originally written as a 'Larghissimo' but changed to 'Largo' in the revised 1950 score, incorporates a wondrously serene 'cantabile' style of piano writing not often found in Stravinsky's music of the 1920s. The movement's two melismatic cadenzas carry a very rare rubato marking, while the pianistic writing is clearly rooted in the highly ornate filigree so often encountered in the slow movements of Beethoven's early piano sonatas.
"The closing 'Allegro', with its percussive opening material built around open fourths and fifths, exhibits a satirical pastiche blending café tunes, jazz rhythms and even a Baroque-styled fughetta that appears out of nowhere. Taken as a whole, the movement bears a clear relationship to the keyboard toccatas of the eighteenth century, with rapid changes of constrasting and often seemingly unrelated material. Stravinsky performed the work nearly fifty times over the next few years, and its success spawned the composition of several subsequent works for solo piano, two pianos, piano and orchestra, and piano and violin.
"Composed in 1928-9 mostly in Nice, the 'Capriccio' for piano and orchestra is, in effect, Stravinsky's second piano concerto. So eager were audiences to see the composer perform his own works that he was regularly urged to write a sequal to his 'Concerto for piano and wind instruments'. Indeed Stravinsky was in such demand as a pianist that could only composer intermittently, as his touring would allow. The 'Capriccio' was the only new work written in 1929. It is of comparable length to the earlier Concerto; but the similarities stop there. Here the composer employs a full orchestra rather than a wind ensemble and takes full advantage of the addition of strings. Moreover, the piano writing stands in stark contrast to the earlier Concerto. While the outer movements of the Concerto were firmly rooted in the piano's natural percussiveness, the 'Capriccio' is far more lyrical. There are still passages that hark back to the assertive writing of such wind works as the Octet and 'Concerto for piano and wind instruments', but for the most part the 'Capriccio's melodious writing reflects Stravinsky's more recent compositions, especially the two important ballets 'Apollo' and 'The Fairy's Kiss'. As for the title, the composer wrote in his 'Chronicle' that he had in mind a fantasia, meaning a freely structure form that would give voice to a more impromptu-like, capricious style of writing.
"The first movement begins with an introduction marked 'Presto' that quickly gives way to the movement's main material - displaying piano writing that explores the entire keyboard in an undending, continuously expansive manner. From start to finish, with little opportunity for the soloist to grab a breath, the pianist must shape the long, mellifluous lines as part of an unbroken fabric. The movement ends with a restatement of the opening material.
"The heading of the middle movement, 'Andante rapsodico', indicates that the composer was once again writing in an almost improvisatory style, replete with rapid rhythmic figurations of nine-, elevent- and thirteen-note groupings. The resulting flight of fancy are reminiscent of the highly ornamental embroidery evident in the music of Carl Maria von Weber, who, as Stravinsky recalled in his 'Chronicle', exercised a 'spell' over him at the time.
"The second movement leads without pause into the final 'Allegro capriccioso ma tempo giusto' from whence the title of the work springs, since this third movement was in fact composed first. The form is stricter here, adhering to the principles of a classical rondo. The perpetual-motion writing that propels the movement is brilliantly spun throughout both the piano and orchestra.
"The 'Capriccio' was premiered at a Paris Symphony concert in December 1929 with Stravinsky at the piano and his friend Ernest Ansermet on the podium; the composer later revised the score in 1949, but only with minor alterations. Nearly forty years after its premier, the 'Capriccio' found a new home on stage with George Balanchine's 1968 ballet 'Jewels' in which Stravinsky's music was employed in the 'Rubies' section of this perennially popular New York City Ballet production.
"Completed in late July 1959, 'Movements' marked by the composer's most intricate serial work to date - his 'most advanced music' as he declared in 'Memories and Commentaries'. Scored for piano and an orchestra that included a harp and celesta, this astringent, compactly structured work assigns the most important roles to the solo piano. Initially, in fact, Stravinsky entitled the work 'Concerto for piano and groups of instruments'. But he soon did away with the description since the piano does not serve the same role it occupied in his earlier two works for piano and orchestra. Here the keyboard's use is more compressed, more of a contributor to the chamber music environment in which it finds itself.
"The piano seems to have assumed the roles of a solo instrument as a consequence of a commission by Swiss magnate Karl Weber, who wish to have a Stravinsky piano piece for his wife Margrit to perform. 'Movements' was premiered at the Town Hall in New York in January 1960 with Weber at the piano and the seventy-eight year old Stravinsky conducting. Originally there were five short movements (without individual titles and carrying only metronomic indications), including four even briefer intervening sections, marked as 'interludes', of only a few bars without piano (although by the time the work was published those headings were dropped). The work outlines a lexicon of serial techniques: rotations, retrograde segmentations - all within an unmistakably pointillistic orchestral structure. Stravinsky's close examination of the music of Krenek and the piano pieces of Stockhausen at that time evidently left an imprint. The score of 'Movements' reveals a pianism unlike anything Stravinsky had written before. The piano itself establishes a timbral constancy right in the centre of kaleidoscopically changing patterns of constrasting instrumental colours. Occassionally the piano is head alone, but even then only briefly. Most often it is found in combinations with one of the orchestral 'choirs'. Spatially, the pianism is also notably Webernesque in its exploration of the entire register of the keyboard. Compositionally, the work is a testament to Stravinsky's ongoing vitality at the age of seventy-seven, and his remarkable embrace of the most advanced, contemporary serial techniques.
"Also known as the Basle Concerto, the 'Concerto in D' was commissioned for the Basel Chamber Orchestra (Basler Kammerorchester) in 1946 by Paul Sacher, the conductor of the ensemble. Sacher was not only an advocate of Stravinsky during the composer's lifetime, but in the 1980s he established the Sacher Stiftung in Basel, where the vast majority of the composer's archives are now held. This elegant string concerto was written at a time when Stravinsky was acclimatizing to Los Angeles and the dizzyingly popular musical styles to which he was constantly exposed. As a result, the composer dabbled in film music, wrote ballet music for a Broadway revue, and completed a work in the jazz idiom, the 'Ebony Concerto' for Woody Herman, written just before the Basle Concerto.
"Scored for the full complement of strings, the 'Concerto in D' fully explores the richness of a full-blooded string ensemble in much the same way as his earlier Concerto 'Dumbarton Oaks' (1937-8) exploited the opportunities afforded by a chamber orchestra for both strings and winds. The Basle Concerto's string writing runs the gamut of special techniques including cleverly employed spiccato and pizzicato writing often juxtaposed with beautifully lyrical writing assigned to various parts of the orchestra. The Concerto is cast in three movements and displays neoclassical writing at its cleanest - unadorned and alternately gritty and graceful without artifice. The jutting silences and syncopations obvious throughout the first movement, for example, are characteristically Stravinskian in the way they energize the music's flow. The second and third movements reveal a composer still committed to the 'tension and release' formula of tonality but increasingly allowing prolonged dissonances to stand on their own without immediate resolutions. The work was composed entirely in Hollywood shortly before Stravinsky undertook his landmark ballet 'Orpheus', also notable for its luminous string writing.
"Written for full orchestra, including piano and harp, the 'Canon (on a Russian Popular Tune)' is one of Stravinsky's least-known works. The composer originally entitled the piece 'Canon for Concert Introductions or Encore' in the manuscript copy. Written quickly in 1965, and constituting an interruption in the middle of composing the monumental 'Requiem Canticles', it is merely a minute in duration; but its brevity belies a fascinating web in the canonically intricate treatment of the famous 'Coronation' theme from the finale of the composer's 1910 ballet 'The Firebird'. Thematic inversions and augmentations of on of Stravinsky's most memorable folk tunes abound as they snake their way through the separate strands of the orchestra. The switching back and forth between duple and triple time signatures provides a throwback to the alternating asymmetrical metres of the original ballet score. Stravinsky, who sometimes wrote little canons as gifts to his friends, composed the work as a memorial tribute to his old friend Pierre Monteux, who had died a year earlier." (Charles M. Joseph. From the liner notes.)
Performers: BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Ilan Volkov, Steven Osborne
1. Song Of The Volga Boatmen
2. Piano & Wind Concerto: I. Largo - Allegro - Maestoso
3. Piano & Wind Concerto: II. Larghissimo
4. Piano & Wind Concerto: III. Allegro - Agitato - Lento - Stringendo
5. Capriccio: I. Presto
6. Capriccio: II. Andante Rapsodico
7. Capriccio: III. Allegro Capriccioso Ma Tempo Giusto
8. Movements: ♪ = 110
9. Movements: ♩ = 52
10. Movements: ♪ = 72
11. Movements: ♪ = 80
12. Movements: ♪ = 114
13. Concerto In D Major: I. Vivace
14. Concerto In D Major: II. Arioso: Andantino
15. Concerto In D Major: III. Rondo: Allegro
16. Canon On A Russian Popular Tune
