Album insights
Igor Stravinsky primarily used the piano as his instrument, confessing to his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov that he composed on the piano. Despite this, he produced relatively little original piano music, such as a sonata, sonata-like serenade, a few transcriptions, including the brilliant Three Movements from Petrushka, and a number of short pieces, most of which were incidental compositions. Mostly, he viewed it as a sort of musical tool. The layout of many of his scores demonstrates how a small, wiry composer with long arms and broad hands invents music on the keyboard. One of the most famous depictions of Stravinsky shows him pounding the keys of an upright piano in a Swiss pension, playing The Rite of Spring to the amazement of the residents of a street now called Rue du Sacre du Printemps.
The score of this ballet, unlike the previous two ballets Petrushka and The Firebird, does not include a piano part. Nevertheless, the explosive Sacre music was first heard on a piano. Stravinsky played excerpts for Diaghilev, who famously inquired about the chord repetitions in "The Augurs of Spring" continuing for so long, to which the composer replied, "Until the end, my dear." He also played the first part privately to a small audience, including Claude Debussy, and shortly before the premiere in May 1913, he and Debussy performed the work from the newly published piano reduction for four hands, which, save for a few later revisions, corresponds to the version recorded by Marc-André Hamelin and Leif Ove Andsnes.
This initial published version of the work remained the only one for years, through which most musicians and music enthusiasts became acquainted with it. After the tumultuous Parisian performances of 1913 and the three more subdued London performances in the same year's summer, the piece was only performed three more times until Diaghilev revived it in December 1920. In many ways, the music works well on the piano despite the tension-filled brilliance of the orchestral version. It gains concentration without the fantastical and barbaric stage action and possibly explains better how this music was conceived: as an abstract plan of straightforward, monumental blocks, a sort of cyclopean musical architecture comparable to the walls of Tiryns and Mycenae.
Stravinsky composed along a specific scenario, a pagan ritual in which a virgin is chosen and sacrificed annually to usher in spring. In a letter to librettist Nikolay Roerich in September 1911, he wrote, "The music gushes out," referring to the piece. Later in 1920, he told a Parisian reporter that his music was "in no way descriptive but rather an objective construction," claiming he and Roerich had only placed it in Russia to give some stage action. Moving into his so-called neoclassical period, Stravinsky provocatively labeled his Octet (1923/24) as a "musical object influenced by the musical material from which it is composed" and insisted it was "not an emotional work but a musical composition based on objective elements that speak for themselves." This concept was best served by the "cool" woodwinds and clear, percussive piano sound. Around the same time in the early '20s, he chose pianos and percussion for his ballet Les Noces, composed right after The Rite of Spring but not seen on stage until 1923. He also started performing as a pianist in 1923 with his Piano Concerto, followed by the Piano Sonata, Serenade, and later the Capriccio for Piano and more or less a full orchestra.
The idea of composing for two pianos arose during Strawinsky's transition to more concert performances and less ballet and music theater. After the death of Diaghilev in 1929, their collaboration had ceased. Strawinsky's focus shifted to concert music during the '30s, producing works like the Symphony of Psalms, Violin Concerto, and Duo concertant for Samuel Dushkin. The Piano Concerto fits perfectly into this context. "I had immersed myself in the variations of Beethoven and Brahms when I composed the Concerto, and in Beethoven's fugues," Strawinsky told Robert Craft. The concerto includes a grandly structured sonata-form movement, followed by a nocturne and a colossal variation movement reminiscent of Beethoven's and Brahms' variation works.
If one listens to these masterpieces, it might be hard to believe they all came from the same composer. However, it was a characteristic of Stravinsky to reference different traditions and styles in his compositions, aiming to surprise both critics and admirers. For instance, the stylistic contrast between the finale of The Firebird from March 1910 and the first dances of The Rite of Spring, composed only eighteen months later, or that between Les Noces and the Octet, both premiered in Paris in 1923. The Russian primitivism of The Rite and Les Noces may have made way for the more civilized classicism of Concerto for Two Pianos, yet a large portion of the musical language remains consistent, with repetitive figures and unconventional use of standard chords present in all works.
Stravinsky's "musical manners" are exemplified in the two short piano pieces in the current recording. The Tango was originally conceived as a folk song in 1940, published as a piano piece, and is played here in a version for two pianos by Stravinsky's friend Victor Babin. It manages to blend an authentic tango atmosphere with Stravinsky's signature repetitions that disrupt the dance's 4/4 time. The Circus Polka, composed in 1941/42 for the Ringling Brothers and choreographed by George Balanchine for the "Barnum and Bailey's Circus" elephants, even caused the elephants to lose their rhythm according to a critic. These pieces, written as Stravinsky was struggling financially after moving to the US West Coast, show his attempt to marry commercial music with his unique musical style. Regardless of the circumstances, he never abandoned his musical habits, revealing a deeper, unchanging essence in his work.