How Stravinsky put the world to rites

‘Why the sudden attention on Stravinsky?” someone asked me at RTÉ’s Stravinsky in Focus event at the National Concert Hall last weekend. Because he’s worth it, I said. And beyond that, Stravinsky is one of the few giants among 20th-century composers to have visited Ireland and conducted his work here.

The occasion was the 1963 Radio Éireann Festival of Music, for which the Hungarian conductor Tibor Paul had invited the great man to Dublin. Paul, who was then both the station's director of music and the principal conductor of its symphony orchestra, didn't baulk at the cost, and paid $3,000 for Stravinsky to conduct part of a concert of his music at the Adelphi Cinema on Middle Abbey Street (the 2,300-seat cinema stood on the site of what is now the exit of Arnotts car park).

The previous year Paul had marked Stravinsky's 80th birthday with the belated Irish premiere of The Rite of Spring, 49 years after the riot-inducing work was first heard in Paris in 1913. At the Adelphi the composer conducted his Symphony of Psalms and Chorale Variations on Bach's Vom Himmel hoch, and his long-time associate Robert Craft opened the concert with Le Baiser de La Fée.

Last weekend's programming was of a completely different cast. Two full programmes that could have been billed as Stravinsky: After the Rite, music written in the two decades after The Rite of Spring, with Dumbarton Oaks (1938) and the Symphony in Three Movements (1945) as outliers.

The concerts were based around the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra (under Aleksandar Markovic on Friday) and the RTÉ Concert Orchestra (under Pierre-André Valade on Saturday). But these were anything but conventional orchestral concerts.

The RTÉ Contempo Quartet appeared both nights, to play the outrageously original Three Pieces for String Quartet of 1914 (pieces that turn the sounds and practices of the string quartet on their head) and the rather more conventional Concertino of 1920.

Subgroups of the symphony orchestra performed the classically oriented 1923 Octet for wind and the jazz-infused Ragtime of 1918, and, similarly, the concert orchestra took on Dumbarton Oaks of 1938 and the Concerto for piano and wind instruments of 1924, with Hugh Tinney the incisively energised soloist. There was something of the aura of a speedily graceful machine that made Tinney's playing especially exhilarating.

Friday's two largest pieces were the 1930 Symphony of Psalms, one of the 20th-century's greatest choral works, with the RTÉ Philharmonic Choir, and the wartime Symphony in Three Movements which, Stravinsky said, "was written under the impression of world events".

At the time this probably sounded radical for a composer who, in his 1936 autobiography, had written that “music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc”. And he didn’t waver when it came to the symphony either, although later in life he rephrased his 1930s position more succinctly as “music expresses itself”.

Either way, the Symphony in Three Movements is a powerful statement, although hardly in the same expressive mould as the deeply moving Symphony of Psalms, in which the scoring, for an orchestra without violins, violas and clarinets, but five each of flutes and oboes, makes sure that the sound world is at all times utterly distinctive.

Even more distinctive is the wild and wonderful Les Noces (The Wedding) of 1923 for vocal soloists, choir, four pianos and percussion, music that is primitive, visceral, and utterly original and whose ideas in diluted form would later launch the career of Carl Orff.

The rather opaque performance, with Paul Hillier conducting Else Torp, Iris Oja, Mati Turi and William Gaunt, with Chamber Choir Ireland and the RIAM Ensemble, was the weekend's only major disappointment.

The team of vocal soloists for the closing performance of the complete Pulcinella – Máire Flavin, Robin Tritschler and John Molloy – were by contrast agile and razor-sharp, and the RTÉ CO's playing under Valade had real spring.

It was a genuine pleasure that the whole weekend avoided what Stravinsky himself called the approach of the false virtuoso, which he defined as “that performer who plays only 19th-century music, even when it is by Bach and Mozart”, and, by implication, by Stravinsky or Schoenberg, too. The orchestral players might at times have sounded as if they were stretching muscles they don’t often use, but the overarching vision was always on target.

It was strangely disappointing in the printed programme to see a photograph of Stravinsky outside the St Francis Xavier Hall on Upper Sherrard Street with an “unidentified man” on the right of the picture. The man is none other than Robert Craft, who died in November.

No false virtuosity

Stravinsky would have found no false virtuosity in the playing of the Irish Baroque Orchestra Chamber Soloists at Newman University Church on Sunday afternoon. The focus was Italian revolutionaries, composers of the early 17th century who were adopting the title sonata for their instrumental works, and taking great delight in nonvocal melodic extravagance.

With violinist Pavlo Beznosiuk as the afternoon's genial presenter and astute musical director, the music of Castello, Salamone Rossi, Fontana, Marini, Buonamente and Uccellini came vividly to life.

The line-up sported two cornetti, wooden instruments with brass-style mouthpieces, and a tone quality than can range from trumpet-like to an uncanny resemblance of the human voices. The adaptable virtuosity of cornettists Josué Melendez and Jamie Savan was an unfailing delight.

• mdervan@irishtimes.com