Riccardo Chailly was 18 years old when Stravinsky died in Venice, in April 1971. ‘Along with Rossini, he was one of my earliest musical fevers,’ the conductor tells me. ‘It began with my father’s collection of LPs.’ A composer himself, Luciano Chailly attended Stravinsky’s rehearsals and concerts with the Rome radio orchestra in the 1950s and ’60s. Dating from 1954, one of those rehearsals can be heard on YouTube. For an hour and a quarter, speaking French and Italian, the composer coaxes ‘straight’ rhythms and clipped articulation in Scènes de ballet just as Chailly the younger remembers from the CBS-recorded excerpts of the composer in rehearsal. ‘He hates the orchestra’s inclination to play notes longer than they are written. He is always singing in order to spell out the rhythm he has in mind.’

The rehearsal tapes record a firm, quick but also congenial presence on the podium. There are brusque interventions of ‘Adesso!’ and ‘Prego!’ but also requests for ‘più cantabile’ and even ‘espressivo’. Taken as a whole, the value of the composer’s legacy on record – especially the compendious CBS/Sony box-set of his post-war studio recordings – is unquestionable for Chailly: ‘They’re an absolute must for young conductors. They were a major guide for me in searching for my own interpretations. It would be very superficial to act independently of these recordings. You can agree or disagree with them, but you cannot ignore them.’

Not everyone agrees. Boulez insisted that he saw several performances break down completely under Stravinsky’s baton: ‘He was a terribly lousy conductor.’ Teodor Currentzis is another sceptic, in less iconoclastic terms. ‘Of course, it’s touching when you have a genius in front of you, and I love to watch Stravinsky conducting – because it’s Stravinsky! But if it was someone else conducting these interpretations, I wouldn’t like them. It’s about ensemble, details … I saw a Firebird that I liked. But, in general, I’m not a fan of his recordings.’

In general, Stravinsky wasn’t a fan of conductors – most notoriously Herbert von Karajan and how he had dressed up The Rite of Spring in a velvet coat of legato and a ‘hoochie-coochie’ tempo. ‘And in many ways I do agree with him,’ says Chailly. ‘Because the scores are fabulously written, and so the more faithful you are to the text, even in a spartan if not crude way at the beginning of your work with an orchestra, the closer you get to the heart of the piece.’ Having said that, his own first experience of hearing Karajan live was at La Scala, Milan, with the Berlin Philharmonic playing Apollo. ‘It was like a wave of sound filling the hall, and it thrilled me tremendously. In terms of aesthetics of sound, there is a world of difference between that performance and what Stravinsky did with his own score. But still, it was a great performance.’ Taste, aesthetics and ethics do not always harmonise in C major.

BACK TO THE BEGINNING

Stravinsky’s own career as a conductor began quite by accident. In 1914, the year after The Rite of Spring was let loose on the world under the baton of Pierre Monteux, Ernest Ansermet was directing a rehearsal of the Symphony in E flat. Deciding to check the balance in the hall, Ansermet asked the composer to take over – which apparently he did with his usual, preternatural confidence. A matter of months later, Stravinsky took to the podium for the first time in public with a suite from The Firebird. In 1915, he directed the complete ballet in Paris. Essentially self-taught in technique, he learnt the craft of conducting in the way that he approached the art of composition, with a magpie individuality.

‘Stravinsky had such good taste,’ as Currentzis remarks, and he gave himself every opportunity to observe how the best conductors of his day succeeded and failed in getting the precise qualities of attack and colour he wanted from an orchestra – not only when his music was in the hands of convinced advocates such as Ansermet and Monteux, but also when playing the solo piano in his Concerto (1924) or Capriccio (1929) under conductors outside the French tradition such as Wilhelm Furtwängler, Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter and Sir Henry Wood. After the war, the Capriccio rather touchingly continued to serve as an artistic passport when Stravinsky conducted several American orchestras, this time with his son Soulima as soloist. And from these concerts survive our only known records (so far) of Stravinsky as a conductor of other composers’ music, in the Ruslan and Ludmila Overture of Glinka and Tchaikovsky’s Little Russian Symphony.

Also in 1914, Stravinsky bought his first records in Paris, of American popular music, although he did not own a gramophone until the following year. During a Spanish tour with the Ballets Russes, he picked up corrida and gitana records in Madrid – where he saw (and adored) his first Chaplin film. Ansermet then brought him back albums of ragtime from the US. Imagine casting an eye over Stravinsky’s record shelves: would we think we knew the man, as we tend to? When Stravinsky turned 75, Robert Craft reported that his LP collection comprised ‘mostly Renaissance and Baroque music. Mario Rossi’s Falstaff, Toscanini’s Otello (Stravinsky regrets the lack of a good Don Carlo and of a good Guillaume Tell), the Glyndebourne Mozart operas conducted by Busch (Stravinsky cannot endure any other performance of Don Giovanni or Così fan tutte), Scherchen’s Bach and Haydn, Deller’s Tallis and Purcell, Cuénod’s Couperin, Goehr’s Incoronazione di Poppea.’

Back to Stravinsky as performer: his 1925 recording of Les cinq doigts for the American Brunswick label appears to be lost for good. The jury is still out on whether his obsession with the pianola – producing piano-roll transcriptions of Les noces and other works for Pleyel in Paris and later for Duo-Art in London – tells us much beyond his attitude towards recording media as not only valuable and lucrative disseminators of his music but also the means to establish definitive realisations against which all others were to be judged. Also in 1925, however, he composed the solo-piano Serenade in A as probably the first piece of art music specifically written with the gramophone in mind, its four movements each fitting on a single 78rpm side.

CONDUCTING ON RECORD

Around this time, his career as a recording conductor took off, with Columbia albums of Petrushka, The Firebird and The Rite (all freshly remastered and restored to the catalogue in the historical appendix of the just-released ‘Igor Stravinsky Edition’ on Warner Classics). More Columbia sessions in the early ’30s followed, the highlight of them being Les noces, made at Abbey Road in London in 1934 with a raw and vernacular intensity not surpassed by either his CBS remake or subsequent versions led by the likes of Bernstein and Currentzis.

Then in 1935 appeared the first edition of Stravinsky’s autobiography Chroniques de ma vie, with its aphorism which has haunted the performance and study of his music – and everyone else’s – ever since: ‘Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all.’ Beyond Wagner’s ‘Kinder, macht neues!’ has any other statement by a composer been so frequently and clumsily wielded as a weapon against both himself and his perceived enemies? Gramophone correspondent Norman Cameron attended the sessions for Les noces and wrote up an illuminating interview with the composer (8/34). ‘Many people seem obsessed with the idea that I do not desire to express emotion in my music. They are completely mistaken. The emotion is there all right – I myself feel it and express it, and for those who cannot or will not share it, I can only suggest that they consult a psychiatrist!’

Physician, heal thyself: so some will say – and with some justice, bearing in mind the recording of Mozart’s Fugue in C minor, K426, made by Igor and Soulima in February 1938 to fill their 78rpm album of the Concerto for two pianos. What could be less expressive, less emotional, more deliberately a repudiation of everything we think we know about ‘natural’ Mozart phrasing than Stravinsky’s typewriter articulation of the fugue subject, doggedly reiterated at every subsequent appearance? With its ragged coordination, butter-fingered trills and flattened dynamic canvas, the performance is a small triumph of insensitivity, detonating expectations no less efficiently than anything cooked up by Satie, Stravinsky and their friends in 1920s Paris, right down to the deadpan final cadence.

Three months after those sessions at the Pathé-Marconi Studios in Paris, Nadia Boulanger conducted the premiere of a piece which sheds a kinder light on Stravinsky’s Mozart. Dumbarton Oaks is like a historically informed performance of a Brandenburg concerto, conceived just a couple of years after Adolf Busch and his chamber players first made the attempt with Bach’s own music – and while Boulanger was doing the same for Monteverdi and Couperin back in Paris. The acts of composition and performance are fused in a blueprint for ‘authenticity’ as we understand the concept today: a score-based venture, led by musical instinct more than scholarship, to recreate the past in the image of the present.

Despite what Stravinsky would sometimes have us believe, context is everything. When he drips acid over almost every living conductor (except Monteux) and the very notion of ‘interpretation’, he does so against a prevailing post-Wagnerian legacy of performance as a quasi-mystical act of improvisation within ever larger secular temples of art – but also against his own cultural background, and against established ideas of Russianness in the West. As Currentzis explains: ‘The St Petersburg of his childhood was not a place of originality in sacred music. It was a new Rome that took the best of all the cultures, because they have to have the best. The weird thing is that when he came to Paris, he didn’t use what he was taught in St Petersburg. When you look at the tunes of his early music, they are not the prêt-à-porter ones that a young man from St Petersburg would know. He is very advanced in his taste, and in a way he becomes a purist. Instead of taking Glazunov or Rimsky-Korsakov for inspiration, he listens to the music of Debussy and understands where he has to dig into the music of his own culture in order to find pure water. And there was this belief in Europe that the Russians are very “passionate”, very “emotional”. But in fact, no. He came to Paris at a time when people believed there were bears walking through the streets of Moscow, and showed another image of Russia, of high intellectuality.’

THE RIGHT TEMPO: SCORE OR RECORDING?

On looking at and listening to Stravinsky’s music, it becomes evident that his conducting served to refine his composing. Age and infirmity play their part, of course, but the later scores are simpler, their pages whiter, even while the harmonies stay radical. While he thins out the orchestration, he writes in more bowings for strings, more finger positions for the woodwind. ‘I think Stravinsky is one of the creators of minimalism,’ says Currentzis. ‘This is the challenge of his scores. They don’t have a definitive quality about them, where everything is set out. They are more like medieval scripts.’

Stravinsky also observed the impact of recording on his conducting. ‘The frequent repetition of a fragment or even of an entire piece, the sustained effort to allow not the slightest detail to escape attention, as may happen for lack of time at any ordinary rehearsal, the necessity of observing absolute precision of movement as strictly determined by the timing – all this is a hard school in which a musician obtains very valuable training.’

Stravinsky with Robert Craft [photo: Don Hunstein / Sony Music]

Internal pulse – and its manifestation – is one marker of great conducting in any repertoire. Where countless conductors of The Rite succumb to the temptation to slow down (‘Ritual Action of the Ancestors’) or speed up (‘Glorification of the Chosen One’) within sections, the composer’s own recordings are uncannily consistent. Chailly remarks that where Stravinsky diverges from his metronome mark (in, say, Apollo), the recording always feels like the ‘right’ tempo. Currentzis acknowledges: ‘Watching Stravinsky conduct has helped me a lot at points. I could see how a composer was struggling to bring out more of the DNA of the composition, and not giving something of himself to the performance. To my nephew, I wouldn’t say that he should listen to Stravinsky’s recordings of his own music. But in the case of my pupil, I will demand that they listen!’

The dryness of the CBS recordings – both as executed and as engineered – remains a shortcoming, for me and many others. In the neoclassical scores, and even more in Agon, Stravinsky was writing for the orchestral players of the future, who would have decades of practical and embedded experience in music pre-Bach, making it dance without courting mannerism. Chailly defends the composer’s ‘almost cynical’ approach to these scores. ‘He had to be more radical in those years, making absolutely audible what’s on the page.’ The conductor was close to Boulez in his last years: ‘He once said to me about the Rituel in memory of Maderna: “Riccardo, if I did it today, I would be much less radical. I would give myself much more time and space to enjoy it!”’

THE PASSING OF TIME

Even Stravinsky himself acknowledged the passing of time, in principle and in practice. ‘The metronome marks one wrote 40 years ago were contemporary 40 years ago. Time is not alone in affecting tempo – circumstances do too, and every performance is a different equation of them.’ His 1954 New York version of The Soldier’s Tale Suite is considerably quicker and more clipped than his Paris-made early-1930s recording – and, to my taste, parodistically featureless. At the age of 82, live in Warsaw, he pulls the finale of the Symphony of Psalms into a trenchant, near static meditation, and to a degree that would surely have appalled his younger and more resolute self. Is this the spirit of the moment, the wisdom of years, the onset of frailty? Who can say?

Where Stravinsky was undoubtedly wrong was in his belief that bad or inaccurate interpretations would kill his music. ‘Conductors will continue to take their own way,’ concludes Chailly. ‘Stravinsky belongs to a universal sphere of great composers, and we can go far beyond what he did in the ’50s and ’60s.’ Both Chailly and Currentzis are inspired by the multifaceted nature of Stravinsky’s genius, manifest in both music and man, in his friendships with the modernists of art, poetry and literature, and in the ‘volcanic curiosity’ which kept him going. Currentzis recommends another YouTube video, a Canadian-made documentary. The composer Nicolas Nabokov drops in to Stravinsky’s hotel room with a film crew present. The old friends drink whisky together from a single glass. Stravinsky can’t stand the damp, Nabokov tells him Cocteau has just had a stroke. ‘What you can’t transcribe’, says Currentzis, ‘is what great minds they are, how much like teenagers they were to the end.’

 
This article originally appeared in the April 2021 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue – subscribe today