Ladies, Gentlemen and mythical creatures, please welcome to the stage of 'A Slice of Musical Cake' the one and the only John Lyon...
If you’re just getting into classical music, Stravinsky
might not seem like a good choice of composer to listen to: Stravinsky? Isn’t
he that ballet nutter who wrote music so bananas that it caused a riot at its
premiere? Weeeeeell, maybe (a near-riot situation is probably more accurate,
Classic FM et al love to over-romanticise things), but not all of Stravinsky’s
music is such an acquired taste. Even The
Rite of Spring itself appears in
Disney’s Fantasia, so it can’t be
totally inaccessible.
However, if you do still want
a more pleasant introduction to Stravinsky, there can be no better place to
start than Firebird, the first of
Stravinsky’s ballets, and the composer’s first huge success. The piece turned
Stravinsky into a celebrity overnight, and received an overwhelmingly positive
reception, despite some sniffy comments from Debussy (“Il fallait bien
commencer par quelque chose” – “You had to start with something” (Ouch!)).
So, what
made the piece so successful? A good place to start is Stravinsky’s incredible
orchestration, or how he uses the instruments to convey the music he wrote. It
certainly helped that Stravinsky was taught by Rimsky Korsakov, an all-time
true mackdaddy of orchestration and epic beards (check out Scheherazade and Night on a
Bald Mountain (the latter composed by Mussorgsky, but the well-known version orchestrated
by Rimsky Korsakov) whose influence helped Stravinsky use his instruments in
such inventive ways. A few choice examples would be the very opening of the
whole piece: a bass drum roll marked pianissimo.
This sort of effect is not supposed to be heard, but felt through the floor, an
ominous rumbling of what is to come. Shortly after this is the incredible bar of
harmonic glissandi from the string section, where the players touch the string
very lightly and slide up and down at differing points and speeds to create an
ethereal and wispy activation of the natural harmonic partials of the string
instruments, all anchored over a juicy dominant 7th chord.
Then
there’s that finale. It starts with a pretty peachy horn solo, a theme which is
taken by the violins, building and building towards…wait, who writes a fanfare
with seven beats per bar? That’s just
wrong, except, it just sort of isn’t.
It’s pretty flipping fantastic actually, and gives way to a high and low pedal
note with everyone playing full-pelt whilst the brass belt out some extremely
loud and meaty chromatically-rising chords, before Stravinsky pulls the rug out
from under your feet, and you’re provided with the musical equivalent of a
sudden, unexpected dip in the road before one final ultra-crescendo, which any conductor
will try to make as long and drawn-out as possible. Happy listening!
P.S. I didn’t mention that there’s also the Infernal Dance, which I consider to be
the best movement, so there’s that plus countless other brilliant moments. Then,
once you’ve had your Stravinsky baptism, you can go and listen to The Rite of Spring and thank me later.
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