Stravinsky Die Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen Paavo Järvi PTC 5186 046 DSD recorded Download mp3 from: or: classics online Share |

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

Paavo Järvi
Resident in the USA since 1980, the Estonian conductor Paavo Järvi studied at the Curtis Institute of Music, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute under Leonard Bernstein. As a passionate supporter and emissary of Estonian music, he regularly works with the Estonian National Orchestra. He took up the post of Musical Director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in September 2001, and has also held positions on the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.
In January 2004, he will join the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen as Artistic Director. The main emphasis of this collaboration will be the rehearsal for and performance of all of Beethoven's symphonies.
Guest positions have conveyed him to numerous large orchestras including the Philharmonia, the London Philharmonic, the BBC Symphony, the BBC Philharmonic, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, the Berlin and Munich Philharmonic, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the French National Orchestra, the Scala Orchestras in Milan, the Swiss Romande Orchestra, the Czech and Israeli Philharmonic and the NHK, as well as the Tokyo and Sydney Symphony Orchestra. In America, Järvi has appeared with the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonic Orchestras, and the Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Pittsburgh and Los Angeles Orchestras.

Die Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen
With this CD, the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen presents itself with its new Artistic Director, Paavo Järvi. Together with the internationally sought-after conductor, the ensemble wants to consolidate its position as one of the world’s leading chamber orchestras.
The orchestra’s repertoire ranges from Baroque to contemporary music. Moreover, the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen frequently collaborates with specialists for the individual epochs and stylistic directions – for example, with Trevor Pinnock, Ton Koopman, Frans Brüggen, Christoph Eschenbach, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Heinz Holliger, and Pierre Boulez.
Its unique and refreshing style of musical interpretation has resulted in longstanding musical relationships with internationally renowned soloists and conductors, including Viktoria Mullova, Christian Tetzlaff, Sabine Meyer and Olli Mustonen.
Daniel Harding, Thomas Hengelbrock, and Heinrich Schiff were the orchestra’s Artistic Directors before Paavo Järvi.
The stylistic spectrum and the qualitative level of Die Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen are also documented on numerous CD recordings. Moreover, the orchestra has made a name for itself with innovative projects, for example, with the "Five-Seconds Model," a novel management training for high-performance teams.
Die Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen was established in 1980, and has been resident in the Hanseatic city of Bremen since 1992. The musicians are the governing members of the democratically governed ›entrepreneur orchestra‹, and they themselves hold the responsibility for all artistic and financial decisions.

“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---