Igor Stravinsky Three Pieces for Clarinet Solo Larinet Solo

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Igor Stravinsky Three Pieces for Clarinet Solo Larinet Solo

PROGRAM NOTES by Phillip Huscher Igor Stravinsky Born June 17, 1882, Oranienbaum, Russia. Died April 6, 1971, New York City. Three Pieces for Clarinet Solo A mere five years separate The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky’s great, epochal, orchestral roar, and these tiny, unaccompanied pieces . But after The Rite, which changed the history of music, Stravinsky himself was a changed man. He began to focus on miniatures and on works sc ored for just a handful of musicians, as if he knew that he had taken large-scale orchestral composition to its limit. The culmination of this new fascination with spartan musical textures was The Soldier’s Tale, which calls for seven players. But the tr end reached its extreme in the three solo clarinet pieces that serve as a footnote to that historic score. Composed immediately afterwards, they were written as a thank you present for Werner Reinhart, whose family fortune, made in coffee and cotton (Volka rt Brothers was one of the world’s largest trading companies), had financed the first production of The Soldier’s Tale in September 1918 . Reinhart was an amateur clarinetist —he played in the local orchestra in his hometown of Wintertur, Switzerland—and a p atron of the arts with wide -ranging interests. (In 1922 he purchased the Château de Muzot so that the poet Rainer Maria Rilke could live there rent free in his last years.) These three short monologues are among Stravinsky’s “biggest” little works. The fi rst piece, which explores the clarinet’s low register, began life as a song and was sketched as early as 1916. The second is Stravinsky’s “imitation” of improvisation (he had recently heard live jazz for the first time), written without bar lines. The thir d revisits the tango and ragtime of The Soldier’s Tale. A footnote. Volkart Brothers, run by Werner’s nephew, Andreas Reinhart , since 1985, now oversees a foundation that supports social and environmental issues as well as the arts. Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. © Chicago Symphony Orchestra. All rights reserved. Program notes may be reproduced only in their entirety and with express written permission from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. These notes appear in galley files and may contain typographical or other errors. Programs subject to change without notice. .

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