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Igor STRAVINSKY (1882–1971)
Piano Conversations
Luigi Palombi (piano)
rec. 2021, Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano, Switzerland
DYNAMIC CDS7947 [78:49]

Igor Stravinsky’s music is so inextricably bound up in the public imagination with the concert hall and theatre that it is easy to forget that his iconoclastic art was first birthed through his home piano; a miserable little instrument, which Robert Craft once noted, had a limited compass, was muted nearly to the point of inaudibility, and woefully out of tune besides, adding on another occasion that this dazzling music often betrayed its humble origins by how comfortably it sits within a pianist’s hands. Pianist Luigi Palombi riffs off that observation on this intriguing album—entitled Igor Stravinsky: Piano Conversations. He presents not a mere recital of Stravinsky’s piano music, but rather a brief and illuminating journey through his creative universe, as well as reflections on our own views of the man and his music. It could just as well have been entitled “Stravinsky and Us.”

Recorded here for the first time in its guise for solo piano is Stravinsky’s Praeludium; an appropriate curtain-raiser, not least for how its wispy little melody curiously forecasts “La Vie en rose,” itself inadvertently telling of the composer’s own later quixotic aspirations for crossover success in the United States. Interspersed throughout the disc are various caricatures, sometimes evincing Stravinsky’s aspirational envy, of pop music tropes of his time. (His Tango from 1940 especially comes to mind.) Among them is a now obscure ditty entitled “Summer Moon,” a harmonically and rhythmically sanitized version made by unknown hands of the “Khorovod” from The Firebird (which may or may not have been arranged with the composer’s approval). It is followed immediately by the Varèseian chorale that Stravinsky composed in memory of Claude Debussy, which served as the basis of his Symphonies of Wind Instruments. Stravinsky’s modernist side never strayed far from his (idiosyncratically) populist impulses.

Also included are a couple of works from Stravinsky’s early years. The Scriabinesque Études from 1907 (represented here by the third from the set) are relatively well-known. More fascinating is the early Scherzo from 1902; an amiable, homespun jumble of Mussorgsky and Gretchaninov composed by Stravinsky at age 20. At first listen it hardly betokens any special destiny for its composer, until one notices its repetitiveness and rhythmic irregularity; stylistic features which tantalizingly adumbrate the self-assured maverick who would have the world at his feet less than a decade later. By the time one reaches the end of the disc—a solo piano version of Apollon musagète (composed simultaneously with and differing in a number of details from the better-known version for strings), followed by transcriptions of excerpts from Orpheus and The Rite of Spring—one feels as if light years have been traversed.

Palombi’s dapper, neatly groomed playing pellucidly illustrates how far Stravinsky’s music has come in its continuing reception history: from the forefront of the avant-garde to a part of classical music history every bit as hallowed as the bewigged masters he once sought to subvert. Stripped down to black and white, its inherent ambiguity is unmissable. Palombi’s rendering of the “Sacrificial Dance” from The Rite of Spring is cool, controlled, and limpidly voiced; eschewing percussive pyrotechnics in favor of highlighting the raw folk lyricism so often buried in other performances. Elsewhere, his poised and pointed readings of the Praeludium and Tango further elucidate the extraordinary contradictions that galvanized Stravinsky’s art. Are these snatches of vulnerable lyricism sincere or just a put-on? Sweet and long-breathed, Palombi’s interpretation of the “Pas de deux” from Apollon musagète demonstrates—perhaps more compellingly than the excerpt from The Fairy’s Kiss that precedes it—Stravinsky’s profound debt to Tchaikovsky and, by extension, a past he first denied, then vitiated, and finally embraced (on his terms). Only the pianist’s performance of Arthur Lourié’s transcription of the kinetic Concertino, with its unexpected slow down in the wild dance before the coda, slightly disappoints.

The liner notes, by Danilo Prefumo and Palombi himself, could have benefitted from a more idiomatic translation, but are otherwise fine.

Palombi lays bare the tension between Stravinsky, the man and artist as he was, and Stravinsky the Icon; the popular creation concocted for public consumption in his American years, always ready to drop devastating quips in literary magazines; whose ever-smiling image was more recognized and beloved than his later music often was. Shortcomings notwithstanding, the general impression for this exploration of how the piano in Stravinsky’s life was both mirror and nexus—for him as well as for his listeners—is one of wonderment.

Néstor Castiglione


Contents
John Stafford SMITH (1750–1836)
“The Star-Spangled Banner” (circa 1773) (harmonized by Stravinsky) [1:35]

Modest MUSSORGSKY (1839–1881)
Chorus from Scene 1 of Boris Godunov (1868–1873) (arr. Stravinsky) [1:37]
 
Igor STRAVINSKY (1882–1971)
Praeludium (arr. Stravinsky) (1936–1937) [1:35]
Souvenir d’un marche boche (1915) [1:36]
“The Princesses’ Khorovod” from The Firebird (arr. Wilms) (1910) [4:44]
“Summer Moon” (arr. from “The Princesses’ Khorovod” from The Firebird by anon.) (1946) [3:30]
Tombeau de Claude Debussy (Fragment from the Symphonies of Wind Instruments) (1920) [2:35]
Ragtime (arr. Stravinsky) (1918) [4:27]
Tango (1940) [4:01]
“Polka” from the Three Easy Pieces (arr. Soulima Stravinsky) [:51]
Valse pour les enfants (1917) [1:00]
“Étude No. 3” from the Four Études, Op. 4 (1908) [1:47]
“Pas de deux” from The Fairy’s Kiss (arr. Stravinsky) (1928) [1:48]
Scherzo (1902) [2:12]
“Scherzino” and “Allegro” from Pulcinella (1919–1920) [3:14]
Concertino (arr. Lourié) (1920) [6:42]
Apollon musagète (1927–1928) [28:22]
“Air de danse” from Orpheus (arr. Spinner) (1948) [2:33]
“Sacrificial Dance” from The Rite of Spring (arr. Raphling) (1913) [4:24]