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program notes

IGOR FEDOROVICH STRAVINSKY

SYMPHONY OF PSALMS
LES NOCES (THE WEDDING) RUSSIAN CHOREOGRAPHIC SCENES IN FOUR TABLEAUX
PERSÉPHONE

IGOR FEDOROVICH STRAVINSKY was born on June 18, 1882 in Oranienbaum, now Lomonosov in the Northwest Saint Petersburg Region of the Russian Republic, and died in New York on April 6, 1971. He made the first notations for Les Noces in London in June 1914, assembling the text from a collection of traditional Russian wedding songs, and completed the first version of the score, the one heard at these concerts, on October 11, 1917. The scoring underwent several radical changes, and the final and most familiar version of the score with four pianos and percussion was achieved in the spring of 1923. The first performance of that version, preceded by a private hearing at the house of Princess Edmond de Polignac (aka Winnaretta Singer, the American sewing-machine heiress), was given in Paris on June 13, 1923 by the Ballets Russes with Ernest Ansermet conducting. It is probably because of this Parisian association that the work is still most often called by its French title of Les Noces. The work was first heard in the United States on February 14, 1926, when Leopold Stokowski conducted a concert performance at a Composers Guild concert in New York. The first San Francisco Symphony performances were conducted by Niklaus Wyss in April 1974. The 1917 version was first performed under the direction of Robert Craft at Columbia University, New York, on February 11, 1973. These are the first San Francisco Symphony performances of this version. The score is fully worked out in the Fourth Tableau; for the remainder of the work, where Stravinsky’s manuscript is not always entirely detailed, the necessary editorial decisions have been made by Ramiro Cortes and Robert Craft. Along with four soloists and mixed chorus, there is an orchestra of three flutes (including piccolo), three oboes (including English horn), three clarinets (including E-flat and bass clarinets), two bassoons, four horns, four trumpets, two flugelhorns, three trombones, baritone (the brass instrument), bass tuba, three violins, two violas, two cellos, bass, harp, harpsichord, piano, cimbalom, timpani, bass drum, tambourine, triangle, and snare drum (without snare).

The Symphony of Psalms was composed in 1930; Stravinsky completed the score in Nice on August 15 that year. The work was commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky for the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s fiftieth anniversary, and the title page reads (in French): “This symphony, composed/to the glory of GOD/is dedicated to the ‘Boston Symphony Orchestra’on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of its existence.” The premiere of the Symphony of Psalms was planned for Boston Symphony concerts in December 1930, but Koussevitzky fell ill and the work was not performed; it received its world premiere on December 13, 1930 with Ernest Ansermet conducting the chorus and orchestra of the Brussels Philharmonic Society. Koussevitzky introduced the work in America the following week. The chorus was the Cecilia Society, prepared by its conductor, Arthur Fiedler. The first San Francisco Symphony performance of the Symphony of Psalms was conducted by the composer on March 23, 1937 in the Civic Auditorium. The most recent performances were given in June 1999 in the Stravinsky Festival, with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting. The Symphony of Psalms is scored for mixed chorus with an orchestra of five flutes (one doubling piccolo), four oboes and English horn, three bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, five trumpets (one of them a high trumpet in D), three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, harp, two pianos, cellos, and basses.

Stravinsky began work on Perséphone in May 1933, completed a summary sketch on December 30 that year, and finished the orchestration on January 24, 1934. He conducted the premiere at the Paris Opéra on April 30, 1934. Ida Rubinstein, who had commissioned the work, recited and mimed the title role, and the tenor soloist was René Maison. Stravinsky also conducted the first American performances, which took place at the Boston Symphony concerts of March 15-16, 1935, with Eva Gauthier, Colin O’More, and the Cecilia Society Chorus, whose conductor then was Arthur Fiedler. The only previous San Francisco Symphony performances were given in February 1997; Stephanie Cosserat was narrator, with tenor Stuart Neill, the SFS Chorus, Ragazzi (The Peninsula Boys Chorus), and the San Francisco Girls Chorus, with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting. In 1949, Stravinsky made a few slight revisions in Perséphone, most of which concern metronome marks. Perséphone is scored for tenor (Eumolpus, the Priest), narrator (Perséphone, the Goddess), mixed chorus, children’s chorus, and an orchestra of three flutes (third doubling piccolo), three oboes (third doubling English horn), three clarinets (third doubling bass clarinet), three bassoons (third doubling contrabassoon), four horns, four trumpets (including high trumpet in D), three trombones, tuba, timpani, xylophone, bass drum, snare drum, two harps, piano, and strings.

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BY ANY NAME—The Wedding or Svadebka or Les Noces—this is in every way an amazing work. In this joyous and emotionally charged masterpiece, evoking a Russian peasant wedding, Stravinsky brings us the gift of wondrous variety, from the keening of the bride and the deep seriousness of the invocation of saints and the Virgin Mary, through the giddy exuberance of the party music, to the solemnly ecstatic close. Having created a swirl of images by running together fragments of talk and ritual, he once compared it, aptly, to Joyce’s Ulysses, in the works at the same time (and not many miles away). There, “the reader seems to be overhearing scraps of conversation without the connecting thread of discourse. But [Les Noces] might also be compared to Ulysses in the larger sense that both works are trying to present rather than to describe.

There are four scenes or, as Stravinsky preferred to call them, tableaux. In the first, the bride is made ready and her hair is bound in red and blue ribbons. Leaving home, she weeps, but she does so in part because weeping is part of the ritual. The second scene is the parallel one at the house of the groom. Then comes the bride’s departure from her house, followed by the wedding feast itself. This final tableau is a whirlwind of drinking, talk, toasts, and games. An older couple is chosen to warm the marriage bed, and at last the bride and groom enter the bedroom, while their four parents station themselves on a bench outside the door. The last words we hear are the new husband’s declaration of love to his wife.

We pick up a few names along the way—the groom is called Fetis Pamfilievich and the bride Nastasia Timofeyevna—but the four solo singers do not correspond to specific characters. The lines of the groom, for example, are sung by the tenor in the second tableau, but the closing words in the bedroom are given to the bass.

Usually, with a vocal work, I suggest that the best way in is found by following the text; here, though, if you are going to try to follow the libretto word by word, you are going to miss most of the music. The text is long, something like 2500 words—Schumann’s song cycle Dichterliebe, which takes slightly longer in performance than Les Noces, consists of about 1000 words, and a Bach cantata of about the same length might have 300 or so—and most of them go by at lightning speed. For these performances, we have departed from our standard practice of supplying a complete printed text both in the original language and in English translation. Instead, we give you a surtitled text, in which the translator, Marika Kuzma, Music Director of the University Chorus at UC Berkeley, has rendered the essence of Les Noces; the occasional Russian transliterations are intended to help you orient yourself in the musical torrent.   

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Almost nine years separate the first sketches from the final double bar of the last version of the score. Stravinsky began Les Noces a little more than a year after the premiere of Le Sacre du printemps, and he had just finished his opera The Nightingale, some of which harks back to the time of his studies with Rimsky-Korsakov and some of which is firmly situated in the adventurous new music of the immediate pre-war years. By the time Les Noces was completed, Stravinsky had written The Soldier’s Tale, Pulcinella, the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, and the Octet for Winds. It was a time, for him, of drastic re-examination of ideas about composing, the time in which the later Stravinsky was born, the Stravinsky of the works from Pulcinella to the Requiem Canticles.

While the compositional plan of Les Noces was fixed by the fall of 1917, it took Stravinsky a long time to arrive at the festive sound of the final version. His first idea, realized in the 1917 score, was to use an orchestra with many wind instruments (he was still in the sonorous world of Le Sacre), but to add to this richly flavorful palette the sound of the cimbalom, a kind of Hungarian folk zither (anticipating Reynard), and, by way of strings, use only eight solo instruments (looking—or hearing—ahead to Pulcinella of 1919-20 and the other spare scores of the later years.)

In 1919 Stravinsky came closer to his final idea, using an ensemble of harmonium, two cimbaloms, pianola, bass drum, tambourine, with snare drum, triangles, and cymbals of various sizes. The sound is marvelous, reminiscent of music outside the Western concert tradition such as is made, for example, by the Master Musicians of Jajouka. The 1919 score is excited and exciting, all nerve endings. The four pianos of the 1923 version added weight and solemnity to the buzz.

The Noces we hear at these performances, then, is not the celebration of bells we have come to be familiar with. But a feeling of festivity, that essential Les Noces declaration of love to the world that had formed the composer, is grandly and movingly present. The sheer sonorous richness and range of this 1917 score is intoxicating and something no one who loves Stravinsky’s music would want to miss.

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Together with the Symphony of Psalms, Les Noces is Stravinsky’s most immediately moving composition, a work in his own first language to a text of his own devising. Thinking about the words, so rich in symbols and untranslatable idioms, he wrote, “I wonder if Les Noces can ever completely reveal itself to a non-Russian.” With respect to the “completely,” Stravinsky was surely right. Still, when words and music get together, music takes over, always, and I have sometimes thought that Stravinsky, writing that sentence, had forgotten the engulfing power of his own glorious musical gift.

TO POINT OUT THAT in the Symphony of Psalms Stravinsky uses the word “symphony” in a special way is to be redundant. With Stravinsky everything is a special case. No one composer has given us a more varied series of suggestions about what “symphony” can mean than Stravinsky, with his sequence of the Symphony in E-flat major (1907), Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1921), Symphony of Psalms (1930), Symphony in C (1940), and Symphony in Three Movements (1945). Of these, the Symphonies of Wind Instruments and the Symphony of Psalms are linked not only by their solemnity and a certain austere sound, but also by the composer’s return to the original sense of “symphony” as a mingling of sounds and by his departure from the Classic-Romantic associations that surround the word.

Koussevitzky made no stipulations about instrumentation or form in the commission that resulted in the Symphony of Psalms, and since Stravinsky had had the project of composing psalm settings in mind for some time, this is what he went ahead with. He first thought of setting the psalms in Old Church Slavonic, and the decision to use Latin came only when he was some way into the work. (The numbering of the psalms we use here are, as in the score, those of the Vulgate, and the translations are from the Douay version. The corresponding numbers in the King James version are verses 12 and 13 of Psalm 39, verses 1, 2, and 3 of Psalm 40, and Psalm 150.) He began with Psalm 150, and the first idea he wrote down was the rhythmic figure that, as Laudate Dominum, is a vital presence throughout the quick part of the last movement. “The fast-tempo sections of the Psalm were composed first,” Stravinsky writes, “and the first and second movements of the symphony followed. The Alleluia and the slow music at the beginning of the 150th Psalm, which is an answer to the question in the [39th] Psalm, came last.”

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That a composition should have unique thematic material is a familiar enough idea, at least for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; that it should, or even can, have a unique sonority is more specifically a Stravinskian thought. What Stravinsky calls for in the Symphony of Psalms is an altogether special distribution with unusual concentration on certain sounds (flutes, trumpets, and pianos) and complete omission of others (clarinets and high strings).

For that matter, the scoring and spacing even of a common chord becomes an adventure. An E minor chord is a familiar enough object, but Stravinsky writes measure one of the psalms as though it were the first triad in the history of the world. (One of the first things a student learns in an elementary harmony class is that when writing a triad you emphasize in the first place its root and then its fifth—here those would be E and B, respectively. Stravinsky’s chord, as distributed through his orchestra, is underprivileged in Bs, even more in Es, and the note of which there is by far the most is G—the third, that is, the one that according to common practice and academic theory is not to be doubled). Part of this amazing sound stems from the spacing—the concentration of flutes, oboes, harps, and pianos at the top, the parallel concentration of bassoons, contrabassoon, trombones, timpani, basses, harp, and pianos at the bottom, with all that great gap in between.

Equally characteristic is what happens after this chord—the scurrying sixteenth notes in oboe and bassoon. Stravinsky’s practice is opposed to the classic-romantic way of “modulating” organically from one event to the next. Instead, he proceeds by shock. He makes a deliberately violent leap from the chord to the sixteenth-note figuration and back to the chord. Another vital feature is the dynamic marking of that first chord, mezzoforte. The force of the gesture is unmistakable, and every other composer would have expressed it with a smashing hammerblow of sound. Stravinsky turns its energy inwards, and the compressed, even repressed, nature of his expressive impulses provides an essential clue to the sources of the beauty and power of his music. The Symphony’s intensely moving final pages, Laudate eum in cymbalisbenesonantibus. . ., are another manifestation of that same spiritual reserve.

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Stravinsky is much concerned with unity. The psalms he chose are unified textually. The 39th Psalm is like an answer to the 38th. The Alleluia with which the 150th begins is the “new canticle” of the 39th. In another sense the Symphony is unified in that its three movements are linked and to be sung and played without pause. The first psalm ascends rapidly to its conclusion. With the first notes of the next psalm it becomes clear that the whole first movement has been one great upbeat to the second. Here is Stravinsky’s account of that second movement: “The ‘Waiting for the Lord’ Psalm makes the most overt use of musical symbolism in any of my music before The Flood. An upside-down pyramid of fugues, it begins with a purely instrumental fugue of limited compass and employs only solo instruments. . . The next and higher stage of the upside-down pyramid is the human fugue, which does not begin without instrumental help for the reason that I modified the structure as I composed and decided to overlap instruments and voices to give the material more development, but the human choir is heard a cappella after that. The human fugue also represents a higher level in the architectural symbolism by the fact that it expands into the bass register. The third stage, the upside-down foundation, unites the two fugues [Et immisit in os meum canticum novum].”

Stravinsky regards Psalm 150 “as a song to be danced, as David danced before the ark.” He also startled many of his listeners and readers when Dialogues and a Diary came out in 1963 with the statement that “the allegro in the 150th Psalm was inspired by a vision of Elijah’s chariot climbing the heavens [11 Kings 2, 11]; I do not think I had ever written anything so literal as the triplets for horns and piano to suggest the horses and the chariot. The final hymn of praise must be thought of as issuing from the skies; agitation is followed by the calm of praise.”

There is one more great crescendo as God is praised with timbrel and choir (Stravinsky does not take the Psalmist’s hints on orchestration), but for the praise on high-sounding cymbals and cymbals of joy, the music settles into timeless, motionless quiet. Great censers swing and quiet voices fill the air with their adoration. Or, in music, pianos, harps, and timpani move through three notes over and over, while in the same register as the voices, cellos and trumpets, later on oboes, finally all the winds, spread harmony at once rich and luminous. The Alleluia, the new canticle, returns for a moment to resolve, with the last Dominum, everything into a C major chord, severe and beatific, as beautiful and as special as only Stravinsky could make it.

LE SACRE DU PRINTEMPS AND PERSÉPHONE, separated by twenty-one years, are Stravinsky’s two paeans to spring: the one—wild, fiercely ecstatic, revolutionary, and a symbol of a new musical era—is the most famous composition to have come out of the twentieth century; the other—all lyric leisure, but with every note what Elliott Carter has called “a Stravinsky-note!”—is still one of the least known of that century’s masterpieces.

The choice of story was Ida Rubinstein’s. She came from Russia, a tall woman of what has been described as “mysteriously androgynous beauty.” She was wealthy and she was demanding. Stravinsky recounts that she commissioned the painter Léon Bakst to arrange the flowers in her Parisian garden—in boxes so that the design could be changed every few weeks. She kept a black tiger cub, and it was rumored that she drank champagne out of madonna lilies. Her real talent was in mime, but she was ambitious to dance, act, and sing. In 1909, Diaghilev introduced her in Fokine’s Cléopâtre. She was sensational in a role perfectly suited to her gifts and limitations, as she was again a year later in Scheherazade. Her last performances for the Ballets Russes were in Scheherazade in Monte Carlo in 1911.

After that, Rubinstein was off on enterprises of her own, Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien, with a text by Gabriele d’Annunzio, music by Debussy, and choreography by Michel Fokine was the first of what the dance historian Lynn Garafola calls her “genre-defying spectacles.” In 1928 she formed her own company, the Ballets Ida Rubinstein, with Bronislava Nijinska as her principal choreographer. She died in 1960, in the Provençal town of Vence. Nicolas Slonimsky writes that she was of “an uncertain age (but old).” Music lovers are profoundly in her debt. Aside from her involvement in Perséphone and Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien, she commissioned Joan of Arc at the Stake from Honegger and got Stravinsky to compose Le Baiser de la fée; it was for her that Ravel wrote Boléro.

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Rubinstein had commissioned Le Baiser de la fée after learning that Stravinsky’s Apollo, whose score belonged to Diaghilev’s company, could not be made available to her for staging, and she produced Le Baiser at the Paris Opéra in November 1928. In January 1933 she asked André Gide to approach Stravinsky about a collaboration for a “symphonic ballet” based on Gide’s Hymn to Demeter. Early in February, Gide and Stravinsky met in Wiesbaden to discuss the project, and in short order a libretto was delivered and the composition begun. The entente parfaite, Gide noted both in his journal and in a letter to Ida Rubinstein, did not last long. Gide tells the story in Ainsi soit-il (So Be It) and Stravinsky in Memories and Commentaries, a book of conversations with Robert Craft. What exactly happened, or when, does not emerge with ideal clarity, but it is evident that Gide was upset with a proposed staging far less realistic than he had envisioned and than his script implies. He was even more disturbed by Stravinsky’s treatment of his text. He chose to leave Paris for a vacation in Sicily rather than attend the premiere, and though he later sent Stravinsky a copy of the published libretto with the dedication “In communion,” the two men did not meet again.

In brief, the issue was syllables. The day before the premiere of Perséphone, Stravinsky published an article in the Paris Excelsior, saying that for his new work he had wanted “only syllables, beautiful, strong syllables—and beyond that, a plot.” I do not know how beautiful, strong, and satisfying Stravinsky found Gide’s syllables. On one occasion he referred to his collaborator’s poetry as “vers de caramel.” Stravinsky’s love for beautiful, strong syllables as musical, sonorous objects leading a life independent of their communicative function informed Stravinsky’s vocal music always, no matter whether he was setting French, his native Russian, or Latin, English, Hebrew, or church Slavonic. Gide preferred his words to his syllables.

A quarter century later, Stravinsky the critic quarreled with Stravinsky the composer. Conversations with Igor Stravinsky by Stravinsky and Robert Craft (1959) includes the following exchange:

“R.C. What is the feeling now about the use of music as accompaniment to recitation?”

“I.S. Do not ask. Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.”

To which there is a postscript. In January 1961, Stravinsky completed A Sermon, a Narrative and a Prayer, one of the most beautiful of his late settings of sacred texts. The Narrative is the stoning of Saint Stephen as told in the Acts of the Apostles, and much of it is told in spoken recitation with music. The fascinating thing, though, is that the seventy-eight-year-old composer of A Sermon, a Narrative and a Prayer had precisely considered the “sin” of the fifty-one-year-old composer of Perséphone, and one of the most wonderful features of the Narrative is the subtle, intensely “composed” dovetailing of speech and bel canto.

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Gide, following roughly the second Homeric Hymn (written in the sixth or seventh century B.C.E., and not by Homer), has divided the action into three tableaux:

The Abduction of Perséphone— Eumolpus, chief priest of the Eleusinian rites in honor both of Demeter, goddess of fertility, and of her daughter Perséphone, begins with an invocation. (Eleusis was the site of a temple a few miles northwest of Athens.) The nymphs in whose care Demeter has placed Perséphone praise the beauty of spring. They warn Perséphone not to pick the narcissus, for whoever breathes it will see the Underworld. As Perséphone bends over the cup of the flower, she sees the hopeless, wandering Shades. Eumolpus tells her that they await her coming. Perséphone’s compassion leads her to go to the Underworld, there to become Pluto’s bride and to bring solace to the Shades.

Perséphone in the Underworld— Perséphone sleeps in the Elysian Fields. The Shades ask her to tell them about the earth in spring, but Pluto calls her, and Eumolpus reminds her that she is there to reign over the Underworld, not to show pity. The Shades, the Hours, Mercury himself, offer her gifts. She rejects them, but Mercury hopes that, remembering her mother, Perséphone will be tempted by a fruit. She succumbs when he offers her a bite of a pomegranate, which brings back a longing for the earth. Gazing into the narcissus, which she has brought with her, Perséphone sees the earth held in the grip of winter, and her own mother, Demeter, desperately searching for her. Eumolpus consoles Perséphone, telling her that Demophoön, now an infant boy, will teach humankind to till the soil and that he will bring her back to earth to be his terrestrial bride and Queen of Spring.

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Perséphone Reborn— Demophoön, now called Triptolemus, removes Demeter’s cloak of mouming. Perséphone reappears, and roses spring up where her feet touch the earth. She rejoices at her union with Demophoön-Triptolemus and at being restored to her mother. Perséphone also knows that her bond with Pluto and the Underworld cannot be broken, that for a certain time of each year she must descend to her other home. And that is when and why we have winter.

Gide ends the text of Perséphone by invoking the words of Jesus as Saint John reports them: “Except a corn of wheat falls into the ground and die, it abideth alone: But if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” This Christianization of the Perséphone myth—the emphasis on Perséphone’s compassion and on the idea that it is by her choice that she descends to the Underworld—is Gide’s peculiar and touching contribution to the tale. It represents for him a reconciliation of two currents, classicism and Christianity, whose collision had caused him painful conflict as a young man. For Stravinsky, Perséphone was a return to the theme of sacrifice for the sake of renewal, brutal and involuntary in Le Sacre du printemps, here a voluntary act born of compassion and love.

Let Stravinsky have the last word (from a conversation with Robert Craft, first published in Perspectives of New Music in 1962, where he proposes that Auden fit the music with new words!): “Perséphone does start tentatively, the B-flat music in 3/8 meter near the end is long, and the melodramas tend to beget large stretches of ostinato. I am no longer able to evaluate such things, or ever again be as I was when I wrote Perséphone. But I still love the music, especially the flutes in Perséphone’s final speech (this needs stage movement!), and the final chorus (when it is played and sung in tempo, and very quietly without any general crescendo). I love the chord before the C minor Russian Easter music, too [when the chorus sings ‘Nous apportons nos offrandes’], and I love, above all, the lullaby Sur ce lit elle repose. I composed this berceuse for Vera de Bosset in Paris during a heat wave, and I wrote it for her to my own, Russian, words originally. [Vera de Bosset became Vera Stravinsky in March 1940. She died in 1983.] But the whole of Perséphone was inspired by Vera de Bosset, and whatever tenderness or beauty may be found in the music is my poor response to those qualities in her.”

— Michael Steinberg

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On Disc and in Print

Leonard Bernstein leads a wonderful performance of Les Noces with the English Bach Festival Choir and the English Bach Festival Orchestra, with a set of pianists including Martha Argerich, Homero Francesch, Cyprien Katsaris, and Krystian Zimerman (Deutsche Grammophon). Stravinsky’s own recording of Les Noces brings together a quartet of four legendary American composers as pianists: Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, Lukas Foss, and Roger Sessions. This performance is, however, available only as part of a twenty-two-disc collection, Stravinsky: The Recorded Legacy (Sony).

Michael Tilson Thomas has recorded the Symphony of Psalms with the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus (Sony, with the Symphony in C and the Symphony in Three Movements). Stravinsky’s own recording features the CBC Symphony and the Festival Singers of Toronto (also Sony, also with the Symphony in C and the Symphony in Three Movements).

Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony, with Stephanie Cosserat, Stuart Neill, the SFS Chorus, Ragazzi (The Peninsula Boys Chorus), and the San Francisco Girls Chorus, have recorded Perséphone, part of the MTT/SFS Stravinsky album that includes Le Sacre du printemps and The Firebird and that received three Grammys in 2000, including those for Best Classical Album and Best Orchestral Performance (RCA Red Seal).

The creativity detected in Stravinsky’s various memoirs does not detract from their distinctive flavor, though the ghostwritten An Autobiography (Norton) is less vivid than the several books of conversations with Robert Craft, including Expositions and Developments, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky, and Memories and Commentaries (all California). Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents, with text by Craft and illustrations selected by Vera Stravinsky, is full of valuable material (Simon & Schuster). I also recommend Igor and Vera Stravinsky: A Photograph Album and Dearest Bubushkin: Selected Letters and Diaries of Vera and Igor Stravinsky (both edited by Robert Craft, and both published by Thames and Hudson).

M.S.