IGOR STRAVINSKY (1882-1971) IGOR STRAVINSKY SOMMCD 266-2 Music for Solo Piano (CD1) Music for Piano and Orchestra (CD2)* Music for Southampton Piano Solo and Piano and Orchestra TURNER SIMS Peter Donohoe piano Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra * David Atherton conductor * CD1 1 - 3 Three Movements from Petrushka 16:50 4 - 7 Four Etudes, Op. 7 8:19 2000 © 2000. Venue & Personnel as above. & Personnel Venue 2000 © 2000. 8 - bm Piano Sonata in F-sharp minor 29:15 bn - bp Piano Sonata (1924) 10:18 Total duration: 64:43 CD2 1 - 4 Serenade in A 11:43 5 Piano-Rag-Music 3:34 6 Tango 3:13 7 - 9 Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments* 19:18 bl - bp Movements for Piano and Orchestra* 9:30 : Recorded in Tsuen Wan Town Hall, Hong Kong, 4-6 July 1995. Hong Kong, Hall, Town Wan Tsuen in : Recorded bq - bs Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra* 16:35 PETER DONOHOE piano 2000 HK Phil under exclusive licence to GMN Inc to © 2000 GMN licence under exclusive 2000 HK Phil Total duration: 64:04 CD 1 and tracks 1 to 6 of CD 2 recorded 14-16 6 of CD 2 recorded 1 to CD 1 and tracks September 2016 and 24 June 2017 Arden-Taylor. Engineer: Paul Oke. Siva Southampton. Producer: Sims Concert Hall, Turner at Capriccio Earth. Engineer: Mike Floating Johns. Hatch, Stephen Producer: Jan 26-29, 1999. Concerto & Movements: Piano Front cover photo: © 2017 Olivier Fleury / Festival International de Musique de Dinard International de Musique de Dinard © 2017 Olivier Fleury photo: / Festival cover Front Design: Andrew Giles Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra © & 2018 SOMM RECORDINGS · THAMES DITTON · SURREY · ENGLAND DDD Made in the EU DAVID ATHERTON IGOR STRAVINSKY CD 1 IGOR STRAVINSKY CD 2 Three Movements from Petrushka (16:50) Serenade in A (11:43) 1 1. Danse Russe: Allegro giusto 2:26 1 1. Hymne 3:25 2 2. Chez Pétrouchka: Stringendo – Allegro – 5:12 2 2. Romanze 2:55 Furioso – Adagietto – 3 3. Rondoletto 2:33 Andantino – Allegro Peter Donohoe 4 4. Cadenza finale 2:49 Peter Donohoe 3 3. La semaine grasse: Con Moto – Allegretto – 9:11 piano piano 5 Piano-Rag-Music 3:34 Tempo giusto – Agitato 6 Tango 3:13 Four Etudes, Op. 7 (8:19) Hong Kong 4 1. Con moto (C minor) 1:33 Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments* [19:18] 7 Philharmonic 5 2. Allegro brillante (D major) 3:07 1. Largo – Allegro – Maestoso 7:23 8 Orchestra * 6 3. Andantino (E minor) 1:43 2. Larghissimo 7:01 9 7 4. Vivo (F-sharp major) 1:55 3. Allegro – Agitato – Lento – Stringendo 4:53 Movements for Piano and Orchestra (9:30) Sonata in F-sharp minor (29:15) * David Atherton bl 1. = 110 2:47 8 1. Allegro 10:45 conductor * bm 2. = 52 1:25 9 2. Vivo 5:07 bn 3. = 72 1:09 bl 3. Andante 7:13 bo 4. = 80 1:59 bm 4. Allegro – Andante – Allegro 6:09 bp 5. = 104 2:08 Sonata (1924) (10:18) Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra* (16:35) bn bq 1. = 112 2:58 1. Presto 6:34 bo 2. Adagietto 4:44 br 2. Andante rapsodico 4:37 bp bs 3.. = 112 2:35 Total Duration: 64:43 3. Allegro capriccioso ma sempre giusto 5:23 Total Duration: 64:04 2 3 culled material for solo piano in 1921. puppets (Petrushka, the Moor and IGOR STRAVINSKY Music for Although written for, and dedicated the Ballerina) come to life and find to, Arthur Rubinstein, in the event the themselves involved in a third, more Piano Solo and Piano and Orchestra pianist performed the work only once, timeless tradition: the ménage à trois. There was little in Stravinsky’s music for a new age. Others reviled him as the in Memphis, Tennessee, and then only It prompted from Stravinsky one of his before the trio of ballets that propelled creator of a cacophonous noise that several years later. richest and most animated scores. So him to fame and notoriety to suggest smacked – and rudely so – of vulgar rich, in fact, that distilling it into a version he was a revolutionary in waiting. disregard for the past. Wary of being seen to exploit the for solo piano posed considerable Not even the success of L’oiseau de feu success of the ballet, Stravinsky insisted challenges despite the employment of (‘The Firebird’) in 1910 or Petrushka Stravinsky, himself, was keenly aware the Three Movements from Petrushka athletic technical devices demanding the following year prepared audiences that his music divided opinion, telling were not mere piano transcriptions of gymnastic flexibility and dexterity from for the seismic shock of Le Sacre du The Observer newspaper in 1961 that it the orchestral score. Instead, he said, the pianist. printemps (‘The Rite of Spring’), the was “best understood by children and “My intention was to give virtuoso premiere of which, in Paris in 1913, animals”. That throwaway, tongue-in- pianists a piece of a certain breadth that Setting three of the ballet’s four provoked a near riot to create one of cheek comment both masks and alludes would permit them to enhance their tableaux (‘The Moor’s Room’ excluded), nascent modernity’s defining moments. to the primary attraction of a body modern repertoire and demonstrate the first of the Three Movements, of work characterised by innocence a brilliant technique.” Such are its Danse Russe, depicts the moment at The furore that greeted that fateful and insight, and distinguished by a demands that Stravinsky, although a which the three puppets are conjured evening seemed to fix, as if in aspic, mercurial sleight of musical hand that more than competent pianist himself, into delirious, dancing life; the second, the conjoined but conflicting images disguises an acute technical facility in never performed it in public because, Chez Pétrouchka (‘Petrushka’s Room’), of Stravinsky that stubbornly persist which heart-stopping poetic delicacy he candidly confessed, “I lack the finds the eponymous puppet alone nearly half a century after his death in and pulse-quickening primality are technique”. and disorientated by his love for the 1971 at the age of 89. Janus-like, he was, fused with compelling immediacy. Ballerina; the third, La semaine grasse for some, a radical innovator sweeping Petrushka had fused two great Russian (‘The Shrovetide Fair’) depicts the bustle aside the pastel-hued politeness of It was from Petrushka, a decade after traditions – folk music and puppetry – and colour of a carnival populated impressionism to usher in a new music the ballet’s first staging, that Stravinsky into a ‘ballet burlesque’ in which three by various characters, grotesque and 4 5 comical. In a marked departure from continuing onwards (from bar 99) with uncle, Alexander Yelachich, fondly He was clearly unhappy with this the ballet, Stravinsky spares Petrushka fresh borrowing from the orchestral remembered by his nephew as fledgling work (he was just 21 when his murder at the hands of his jealous score. The result restores to the “a passionate amateur musician” he began it) considering it “fortunately love rival, the Moor. narrative – and the music – a degree – Stravinsky had been steered lost”, as he told Robert Craft as late as of cohesion incongruously absent from resolutely away from music by his 1960, unaware that it was safe in the Linking each of the scenes in the ballet the original. concerned parent towards a career archives of the Leningrad State Public was the ingenious use of a drum-roll in law. That was to change, with his Library (now the National Library of in F-sharp, a device omitted from the The often caustically imperious uncle’s encouragement, following an Russia in St Petersburg). It remained piano score. Recognising its value, Stravinsky had little regard for the encounter with Rimsky-Korsakov, then unpublished until 1973, two years after Peter Donohoe here substitutes it music of the increasingly idiosyncratic the elder statesman of Russian music, his death. with a new phrase on piano (also in Alexander Scriabin. He did, however, in 1903. F-sharp) that adroitly restores dramatic grudgingly confess to being influenced If Rimsky-Korsakov’s influence is to momentum and maintains the sense of by him “in one insignificant respect, Under Rimsky-Korsakov’s tutelage, the fore in a four-movement work continuity between each of the scenes. the piano writing of my [Four] Stravinsky began the Piano Sonata whose adherence to convention owes Etudes, Op. 7”. Composed in the early in F-sharp minor in the summer of everything to his pupil’s inexperience Also missing from the piano version summer of 1908, their preoccupation the same year while holidaying on with large-scale forms, the thumbprints was a telling interlude in La semaine with irregular, wilfully disrupted his uncle’s estates east of the Volga of others – notably Prokofiev, Scriabin, grasse featuring a peasant (depicted rhythms and heightened chromaticism River, completing it in 1904. The Rachmaninov and Glazunov – are also by high clarinet) coaxing his reluctant point, in hindsight (and on a less grand piano had been central to Stravinsky’s readily identifiable. Stravinsky regarded bear (cellos and basses) to perform, scale), to the mutable mercuriality of musical life since the age of nine. It it as “an inept imitation of Beethoven”. and the bear’s clumsy mimicry of the Petrushka and Le Sacre du printemps a transformed him into an autodidact peasant (tuba). Here, Donohoe alters few years hence. (his early understanding of harmony Imitative perhaps, but by no means bars 96-98 of the piano score to more and counterpoint gleaned from inept.