Chatting to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau on the phone a little while ago (a colossal, even classic, name-drop I know, of which more later) when we’d just started preparing this issue’s tribute to Stravinsky, I mentioned that one reason for the salute was that this year marks four decades since the composer’s death. ‘Forty years, already?’ 
he sighed. ‘It goes so fast.’

I suppose that was the moment it hit me, born after Stravinsky’s departure, quite how modern he remains. Such was his impact on the music world, so momentous his influence, that he seems already, he is, part of history. Stravinsky’s birth heralded a new epoch during which his physically diminutive presence loomed so large that everything after his death is naturally defined as ‘post-Stravinsky’. So in some senses it’s all too easy to think of today as separated from that time.

Yet the fact of his death doesn’t mean that his work doesn’t live, and in some ways it continues. It continues in the composers who came after him and explored the paths he forged. It continues in the reminiscences and teachings of those who actually knew him and pass on the flame. So it seemed apt to include some of those reminiscences in this issue. If we focus more on the man than the musical theory that’s because many of these tales haven’t been told before – and it’s 40 years on and in another 40 they could have been lost forever. We’ve tracked down some of Stravinsky’s most fascinating colleagues. So enjoy their anecdotes. I guarantee you’ll never think of the composer in quite the same way again.

I started this editorial with a name-drop. It has been one of the great delights of the job that one can pick up the phone to a musical hero and (usually) be assured of a pleasant response. I hope that continues for me, but it won’t be as editor of Gramophone. This is my last issue in that capacity as, after nearly six years to the day, I leave to seek new challenges. Leave? I should say revert, to my former role as avid reader, with some writing no doubt thrown in. Thank you for having me as 
guardian of this great magazine for these years. It has been a privilege.

James Inverne