| Suite from: › l’Histoire du soldat ‹ (The Soldier’s tale) (1918-1920) |
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| 1 | Marche du soldat (Soldier’s march) |
1. 59 | |
| 2 | Petit airs au bord du ruisseau 2.58 (Aires by a stream) |
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| 3 | Pastorale | 3. 52 | |
| 4 | Marche royale (Royal march) |
2. 45 | |
| 5 | Petit concert (Little concert) | 3. 11 |
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| Trois danses (Three dances) | |||
| 6 | I: Tango |
2. 17 | |
| 7 | II: Valse | 2. 04 | |
| 8 | III: Ragtime | 2. 12 | |
| 9 | Danse du diable (Devil’s dance) |
1. 34 | |
| 10 | Grand choral (Great chorale) | 3. 04 | |
| 11 | Marche triomphale du diable (The devil’s triumphant march) | 2. 15 | |
| 12 | Ragtime for eleven instruments (1918) | 4. 45 | |
| 13 | Petit choral (Little chorale) (from › l’Histoire du soldat ‹) (1918) |
0. 46 | |
| Concerto in E-flat › Dumbarton Oaks ‹ (1937-1938) |
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| 14 | Tempo giusto | 4. 55 | |
| 15 | Allegretto | 4. 34 | |
| 16 | Con moto | 5. 43 | |
| Concerto en Ré (Concerto in D) for string orchestra (1946) |
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| 17 | Vivace | 6. 33 | |
| 18 | Arioso – Andantino | 2. 42 | |
| 19 | Rondo – Allegro | 3. 25 | |
| Suite No. 1 for small orchestra (1917-1925) | |||
| 20 | Andante | 1. 35 | |
| 21 | Napolitana | 1. 16 | |
| 22 | Española | 1. 09 | |
| 23 | Balalaïka | 1. 00 | |
| Suite No. 2 for small orchestra (1921) | |||
| 24 | Marche | 1. 27 | |
| 25 | Valse | 2. 15 | |
| 26 | Polka | 1. 01 | |
| 27 | Galop | 1. 57 | |
Total playing time |
72. 53 | ||

Stravinsky PTC 5186 046 Download mp3 from: or: classics online
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Igor Stravinsky: scandal-ridden revolutionary and popular
favorite, a classic already during his own lifetime and, simultaneously,
an avant-garde composer,
repeatedly defamed as a charlatan and yet acclaimed as one of the most important
composers of the twentieth century. His oeuvre is an extraordinary intersection
of historical tendencies. Like no other composer, he bowed down over the
whole of musical history and derived his inspiration from it. »Everything
he touches, he makes his own,« said Jean Cocteau about him. And he
touched a lot of things. The fundamental availability of all musical styles
was the actual basis of his work. Out of the given stuff he ›invented‹ his
own material. At the same time, however, his works always carry his unmistakable
signature. Creative restlessness marked Stravinsky’s existence, which
started anew with each of his three citizenships and extended over nearly
ninety years. His oeuvre, too, is just as varied as were the periods of his
life: from the style of the early years, influenced by his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov,
to the ›cubist‹ composition, for example, of Le Sacre, from neoclassicism
to late dodecaphony – and in between repeated excursions into jazz,
dance, and Gebrauchsmusik (i.e., music for practical use). Stravinsky expanded
the palette of all genres. And like no other composer, he continually irritated
his listeners and performers with his unexpected metamorphoses. It is precisely
his roaming through musical history, his consciously intended ›eclecticism‹ that
makes up Stravinsky’s unique originality.
The present CD offers a selection of compositions for middle-sized ensembles,
which still require a conductor, yet challenge each musician individually.
In these works Stravinsky allows a maximum of unusual timbre combinations
to come forth from the homogeneous ensemble, or limits himself to a few characteristic
instruments that make possible a clearly contoured voice leading and transparency.
Moreover, all the works have in common the skillful playing with styles and
quotations, the musical masquerade, always combined with the mischievous
joy of exaggeration and the grotesque.
In order to improve his strained financial situation in Swiss exile during
the First World War, Stravinsky decided to write, together with the poet
Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, an unostentatious chamber opera for a small touring
company. L’Histoire du soldat was to be nothing more than a quickly
thrown together occasional work – and became, through the radical break
with traditional stage dramaturgy, the prototype for the musical theater
of the twentieth century.
The war background is reflected in the plot. The piece tells the story of
a soldier who sells his soul (symbolized by the violin) to the devil, wangles
him out of it again, but still winds up in hell in the end. The idea came
from a collection of Russian folk tales.
Freeing it of all picturesque-folkloric elements, Stravinsky composed an
epic theater piece in which instrumental composition, pantomime, narration,
and dialogue alternate and, in this way, comment on one another. This multiplicity
corresponds to the use of the musical means: Russian folklore, dance, popular,
and functional music are contrasted in a tonally rough montage, and simultaneously
stylized and treated with irony. Stravinsky also set out on a new path in
terms of the make up of the ensemble. From each family he chose a high and
a low instrument: violin and double bass, clarinet and bassoon, cornet and
trombone, as well as percussion – instruments that compete against
each other, as it were, since their sounds do not mix.
Shortly after the premiere in Lausanne in 1918, Stravinsky put together for
the concert hall an instrumental suite made up of nine of the original eleven
pieces. Not included in this suite was the ›Petit Choral‹, of
which Paavo Järvi is particularly fond: »In my opinion, Stravinsky’s
choral compositions are absolutely brilliant. It is astonishing how he treats
the leading voice, and makes a well-known chorale into something new by means
of small alterations. For this reason, the ›Petit Choral‹ had
to be included on this CD – not as a part of the suite, but as a bonus.
It is as if one adds to the seasonings.
A short movement that provides clarity.
Take it as it is. There does not have to be a profound statement behind it;
it is just a fantastic piece.«
Written in the same year as L’Histoire du soldat, the Ragtime for eleven
instruments was, according to Stravinsky’s own testimony, a »composite
portrait of this new dance music, giving the creation the importance of a
concert piece, as, in the past, the composers of their periods had done for
the minuet, the waltz, the mazurka, etc.« Besides the original treatment
of jazz elements, the unconventional instrumentarium astonishes; alongside
the string and wind soloists, and percussion, the cymbalon – the large
dulcimer used by Hungarian Gypsies – plays a leading role.
Suites Nos. 1 and 2 are also the result of Stravinsky’s intellectual
occupation with the subject of ›dance‹. Both are based on older
compositions: From the two sets of piano duets Cinq pièces faciles
(1916/17), composed for his children, and Trois pièces faciles (1914/15),
dedicated to his friends Alfredo Casella, Erik Satie, and Serge Diaghilev,
Stravinsky put together two four-part cycles and orchestrated them for small
orchestra in 1921 and 1925, respectively. With its national dances, the First
Suite is a musical journey through Europe. A tranquil ›Lullaby‹ is
followed by a ›Neapolitana‹ that imitates the whirling temperament
of a tarantella. The ›Española‹ clearly echos the stamping
rhythms of north-Spanish folk dances. With fast tone repetitions, the concluding ›Balalaika‹ simulates
the plucked sound of the instrument of the same name.
In Suite No. 2, Stravinsky parodies the motions of popular ballroom dances.
Extremely distorted in terms of rhythm, meter, melody, and harmony, they
are exposed by Stravinsky as stereotypes, and give the impression of being
flawed forgeries. The ›March‹ comes along heavy-handed and awkward.
The second movement is a bizarre parody of the melodic bliss and insistent
triple meter of the Viennese waltz. For the ›Polka‹, Stravinsky
imagined the famous ballet impresario Diaghilev as a circus director with ››a
long, cracking whip.‹‹ The closing ›Galopp‹ imitates
Jacques Offenbach’s fast cancans.
The two suites are not intended for dancing, but for listening. Like the
Ragtime, they are ›portraits‹ of dance forms, and are of incomparable
originality precisely in their extreme limitation of means.
A form with which Stravinsky occupied himself repeatedly and in various ways
is that of the concerto. His Dumbarton Oaks Concerto in E-flat for chamber
orchestra numbers among the most beautiful works from Stravinsky’s
neoclassical period. Named after the country estate belonging to Mr. and
Mrs. Bliss, who commissioned the work, it was premiered there on 8 May 1938
under the direction of Nadja Boulanger. Like in few other works, a music-historical
juxtaposition succeeds here: Stravinsky’s reflection in the music of
Johann Sebastian Bach. Not only does the slow-fast-slow arrangement of the
movements allude to the Brandenburg Concertos, but even the themes of the
first movement display similarities to Bach. In contrast to the Baroque model,
however, harmonic standstill prevails in Stravinsky, so that in the contrapuntal
work of the greatest compositional sovereignty the individual motivic components
are exchanged for one another, or indeed even appear simultaneously in order
to intensify the fugue-like finales of the outer movements.
»
A color palette without actual contrasts, only with the possibility of using
nuance« (Jacques Handschin) – this challenge inspired Stravinsky,
entirely unexpected and without precedent, to an extravagant string-orchestra
sound in his ballet music Apollon Musagète. With his Concerto in ré,
composed in Hollywood in 1946 as a commission from the Swiss patron Paul
Sacher for the twentieth anniversary of the Basel Chamber Orchestra, Stravinsky
once again picked up the thread of this string experiment and, simultaneously,
of the Baroque concerto-grosso form of the Brandenburg Concertos, albeit
in a more unwieldy and austere tone than in Dumbarton Oaks. On the motivic-thematic
level, this work displays a very highly condensed structure: All three movements
are derived from a tiny germ cell – the semitone and its inversion.
Asked by Paul Sacher to provide a short introductory text for the premiere
in Basel on 27 January 1947, Stravinsky wrote a note very typical of him: »that
the work is composed for a string orchestra (exactly! – one will see
this straight away), that it has three parts (exactly! – one will read
it formally in your programs), that it is only the least bit atonal (but
exactly! – do you not think that the audience will perhaps have the
pleasure of discovering this by themselves?)«
Anne do Paço ; translation: HowardWeine
“Each instrument is perfectly scaled and dimensional. Let’s
hope that PentaTone gives us more Järvi with chamber forces to complement
the full-orchestra repertoire he’s addressing with Cincinatti.”
--Andrew Quint, Avguide.com
“This
lively and loveble disc of Stravinsky’s neoclassical and small ensemble
pieces stands with the best available. The two Suites for Small Orchestra never
have been better done… the Deutche Kammerphilharmonie is a world-class
chamber orchestra, and it doe itself proud here.”
---David Hurwitz, Classics Today.com
“The Stravinsky collection is particularly attractive as it contains some
of the composer’s best-known works for small orchestra in brilliant
performances, vividly recorded. The entire program, is a delight.”
---Bob Benson, www.classicalcdreview
“...and this PentaTone release is probably among the five best-sounding
high-resolution discs encountered thus far....The new PentaTone is definite
Want List material.”
---Andrew Quint, Fanfare
“
In sum: a stunningly persuasive recreation of the sound of real instruments
arrayed in a real performing space-in this case, Radio Bremen’s lively
Grosser Sendesaal”.
---Mark Lehman, The Absolute Sound
“
I never heard the String Concerto in D played with better ensemble and such
attantion to detail. Each movement here shimmers with precision, yet nothing
sounds cold”.
---John Shinners, enjoythemusic.com
“
And the Galop that concludes the Suite No. 2 is a stunning showpiece that
deserves to be heard on a fair number of audiophile radio shows.”
---Phil Muse, Atlanta Audio Society
“
..interesting, first of all because of the programming, furthermore because
of the sound quality and last but not least because of the excellent performance
of the orchestra”.
---Steff, Pizzicato
“
This is a recording of demonstration calibre for a new formatthat allows
intricate resolution. Artistically and sonically, in both departments, this
hybrid SA-CD is a must-have recording for all collections”.
Rad Bennet, www.soundstage.com---