Midlife Stravinsky: No Crises, Thank You

It was once fashionable to consider everything Igor Stravinsky wrote between his early ballets and late serial compositions as symptoms of a protracted midlife crisis. To many observers, his post-World War I neoclassicism was less a manifestation of a new style than a desperate cannibalizing of the past to compensate for not finding an original direction after having exhausted the vein of “Sacre du printemps” primitivism.

It’s taken us a long time to catch on to the power and originality of this old new music. And while performances of the early ballet scores continue to draw crowds and to proliferate obscenely on recordings, the middle-period works, created roughly between 1920 and 1940, are slowly achieving recognition--on recordings, at any rate.

“Pulcinella,” the commedia dell’arte ballet with music acknowledgedly filched from Neapolitan Baroque sources, started it all in 1920. And though the complete score is hardly a ballet staple, it is found with increasing frequency on recordings that, in turn, have generated a heartening number of live performances by American orchestras.

Its latest CD edition (Delos 3100), with Gerard Schwarz leading members of the Seattle Symphony, is unlikely to win converts. Starting with a sluggish overture, Schwarz’s attention seems fully engaged only in the fastest sections, where listeners can savor the lively virtuosity of his orchestra’s oboe, trumpet and trombone brass principals.

Among the trio of vocal soloists, Susan Graham’s pliant mezzo (she is listed as a soprano) successfully negotiates the extremes of range demanded by the composer, and bass Jan Opalach handles his songs stylishly. But bearing with the strangulated tones of tenor Gran Wilson, hardly helped by a breath-defyingly slow tempo in his first number, is rather much to ask.

The coupling is yet another “Sacre du printemps.”

A livelier, more engaged “Pulcinella”--the suite, without vocal solos--is played with great panache and skill by New York’s Orchestra of St. Luke’s, conducted by Robert Craft, the composer’s longtime collaborator. It is included in Volume II (MusicMasters 67086) of Craft’s proposed multipartite response to and improvement on Sony’s vast Stravinsky Edition, many of whose composer-led performances were, in Craft’s estimation, more the product of their producers’ eagerness to save money than representative of the master’s interpretive wishes.

The Craft-led “Pulcinella” is alert, quick, optimally cool. To judge by this recording, Craft sees “Pulcinella” as acidulous rather than innocent fun, and he projects his tenable view convincingly.

The generous program includes two additional large-scale compositions: the sere, unengaging Symphony in C (1939) and “Les Noces” (1917-23), the most ferociously rhythm-oriented of the composer’s post-”Sacre” creations, forcefully delivered by Craft’s ensemble of pianists, percussionists and vocalists.

Less prepossessing, if no less satisfying, are a group of Stravinsky’s Russian peasant and sacred songs, the former (1914-17) for unaccompanied female voices, the latter for various choral groupings and from various stages, middle and late, of the composer’s career. All are masterfully delivered by the Gregg Smith Singers under Craft’s firmly shaping, sympathetic hand.

A composition whose time may be long in coming is “Persephone” (1934), a glacial masterpiece of Stravinskyan archaism--the final and perhaps least immediately affecting of those stylized works, also including “Oedipus Rex” and “Apollo,” intended to evoke the ritual spirit of Greek drama.

The present recording, which seems to be only the third in the work’s existence, was among the last and most dazzling from Virgin Classics (915115, two CDs, with, again, “Le Sacre du printemps”) before that label’s sale to EMI.

Kent Nagano conducts the splendidly responsive London Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus with optimal subtlety, constantly approaching, and ultimately drawing back from, explosiveness. An impressive job of conveying the essence of this elusive music.

The suave tenor soloist is the ubiquitous Anthony Rolfe Johnson. The narrator of Andre Gide’s French text is Anne Fournet, whose gracefully sculpted, gently sexy delivery is preferable to Vera Zorina’s overtly theatrical presence on the more slowly paced composer-led recording.

In a forthcoming On the Record, the operatic Stravinsky: his “Le Rossignol” and “Oedipus Rex,” conducted, respectively, by Pierre Boulez and Esa-Pekka Salonen.