Stravinsky: Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)

Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments

1. Largo - Allegro - Maestoso
2. Largo
3. Allegro

The piano was central to Stravinsky’s composing routine, but it was not until 1924 that he began to see performing on it in public as a potential source of revenue for himself. Always of an entrepeneurial bent, he had in the years since the Russian Revolution and the end of the First World War been working hard to expand his sources of income through a variety of means. As well as performing, the early 1920s saw Stravinsky take up conducting, and engage in the creation of piano rolls of his music. There were certainly good incentives to engage in these activities: all enabled his music to be propagated to a wider audience. However, another advantage was the control they gave Stravinsky over the presentation of his music. He was spurred to take up the baton by the cool reception given to the premiere of Symphonies of Wind Instruments and in 1923 as well as conducting the early performances of his Octet took advantage of another new technology by making a recording of the piece. Meanwhile, he had been taking advantage of facilities offered by the Pleyel Company in Paris to create pianola versions of his works. In an interview he explained that his aim in creating these rolls was not to produce ‘a photograph of my playing... but rather a “lithograph”, a full and permanent record of tone combinations that are beyond my ten poor fingers to perform.’


These activities - the taking charge of performances and using various means of mechanical reproduction to relay his music - may be seen as a reflection of his increasingly vocal antipathy to the very idea of “interpretation”, which he characterised as “a crime against the composer”. His music, he asserted, should be performed exactly and precisely as he had written it, with no liberties whatsoever to be taken by the performers. The player-piano in particular appealed, as an instrument able to produce a performance without any interpretive interference.


It is ironic that with the premiere of his Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments in 1924 Stravinsky used music designed to deny the possibility of individuality to launch his career as an interpretive performer. Whether he intended this from the start or whether that he should take the soloist’s role was suggested as he neared completion of the work by its commissioner Serge Koussevitsky, is unclear. Certainly the influence of Carl Czerny's studies that Stravinsky practised to prepare for his public performance can be heard in the concerto. Also unclear is whether there is any truth in the tale of his memory lapse at the first performance. As Stravinsky himself relates it in his memoirs, “After finishing the first movement and just before beginning the Largo which opens with a passage for solo piano, I suddenly realized that I had completely forgotten how it started. I said so quietly to Koussevitzky, who glanced at the score and hummed the first notes. That was enough to restore my balance and enable me to attack the Largo.” Stravinsky was a master of inflating his own myth, however, and Sergei Prokofiev, who was present, remembered no such incident. The concerto was performed over 40 times in the first five years of its existence, all with the composer at the piano - Stravinsky had made sure to retain exclusive performing rights for himself, realising that the fees he earned as performer of the concerto were rather greater than the performing royalties he received as its composer.


The Concerto is one of the earliest manifestations of his so-called "neoclassical" style. The distinctly Russian voice of his earlier works is abandoned in favour of what appears to be a mask stitched together from gestures drawn from earlier music. In addition to the exercises of Czerny's, the concerto displays a debt to baroque. The absence of strings follows the example of Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments and his cantata Les noces [The Wedding], which was originally envisioned as an orchestral work but ended up scores for pianos and percussion. “The short, crisp dance character of the Toccata (the concerto's first movement)," explained Stravinsky, "engendered by the percussion of the piano, led to the idea that a wind ensemble would suit the piano better than any other combination. In contrast to the percussiveness of the piano, the winds prolong the piano's sound as well as providing the human element of respiration."


The music of the concerto swings between two poles. These are set out in the first movement, in which a slow, monumental, Handelian introduction leads to a hyperactive toccata which embodies the "sewing machine" view of baroque music. The subsequent two movement repeat this pattern: a solemn slow movement and a sparkling motor of a finale, which pauses slightly for a recollection of the very opening before speeding to its conclusion.


Stravinsky recalled that on another occasion performing the concerto,“I suffered a lapse of memory because I was suddenly obsessed by the idea that the audience was a collection of dolls in a huge panopticon. Still another time, my memory froze because I suddenly noticed the reflection of my fingers in the glossy wood at the edge of the keyboard.” Such detached, isolated feelings perhaps offer a clue to the unsettling effect of his neoclassical style. The mechanical sewing-machine rhythms and the ironic appropriation of archaic musical gestures suggest something more than simply the donning of a mask, but the disturbing possibility that there is nothing behind the mask.