Caring for Stravinsky

Musical Times, Summer 2002 by Gritten, Anthony

Chapter 8, `The Rite recorded', is the best chapter in the book. Hill gives an interesting account of changing traditions of performance practice (Hill, p. 135), especially with regard to longer-range structural aspects of performance (Hill, p.140). Lamenting the general gradual loss of character in more recent recordings (Hill, pp. 137-39), Hill observes that, while early conductors who had learnt the work in the theatre (Hill, p. 137) `regarded the Rite's rhythms as melodic and gestural rather than mechanical' (Hill, pp.120, 126, 127), as time has gone by and recording technology has developed (by almost fateful coincidence, in sync with The rite itself (Hill, p.118)), recording has become a means of exerting greater and greater 'control' over performance (Hill, p.118). The irony of this has been that slavish adherence to Stravinsky's doctrinaire letter as promulgated in his written polemics has tended to make performances Apollonian, in only a narrow sense and often rather graceless.

Indeed, because The rite was `formally very strong' (Hill, p.142), more so than Firebird and Petrushka, and did not require refashioning into a suite, being a concert work as it stood, this has made it ideally suited to the `modern [read: Modernist?] ideals of clarity' (Hill, p.130) preached by certain performers and ideologues, in which `steadiness and implacable force often takes precedence over any characterising of the "cells"' (Hill, pp.136, 127). Hill describes Boulez's 1969 recording, for example, as `so meticulous as to be "precious" (hence sinister)' (Hill, p.131), in contrast to the `sumptuous, glamorised sound (and tempo) of Karajan, Mehta or Nagano' (Hill, p.129). This differentiation between the broadly "`Romantic" approach' (Hill, p.131) and the mechanical echoes an important recent article on the two main strands of performance practice which have been associated with The rite, namely the 'vitalist' and the 'geometrical'.11 Hill's endorsement of his preferred recording (Simon Rattles CBSO) seems pragmatically to mediate between the two extremes he distinguishes, equating `great architectural - one might say "symphonic" - statement' (Hill, p.139) with `imbued with character' (Hill, p.138).

DAVID Smyth has described the project which has resulted in Joseph Straus's latest book as 'a monumental investigation of Stravinsky's late music'.12 Indeed it is, and a worthy rejoinder to Erwin Stein, Stravinsky's London editor, who once wrote to the composer, saying that `Your 12-tone rows will cause an upheaval in the musical world and will keep analysts busy' (quoted in Straus, p.58). Containing a treasure trove of information about the serial underpinnings of Stravinsky's last twenty works, Stravinsky's late music is the first booklength study of the repertoire and contains valuable explications of Stravinsky's talmudic compositional thought during the 1950s and 1960s, especially of the infamous `rotational arrays' and 'verticals' - and some curious discoveries, one being, for example, that Stravinsky copied out, with an as yet unfathomed intention, the row from Boulez's Structures 1A in his Threni sketchbook (Straus, p.33 n.60). This, though, is not a book about the cultural reception and significance of Stravinsky's serial music and about the place of serialism in the history of musical styles; that's for another author to write (though Straus has tried his hand at it13).