courtesy of Bruno Monteiro
Portuguese violinist Bruno Monteiro continues to expand his repertoire in unanticipated directions. Those following my writings for some time know that he has previously explored the catalogs of Karol Szymanowski, Erwin Schulhoff, and, most recently, Guillaume Lekeu. His latest album turns to more familiar selections, most of which are not in their usual settings. The album consists entirely of music for violin and piano by Igor Stravinsky; and, as in previous recordings, Monteiro is accompanied by pianist João Paulo Santos. As of this writing, it is currently available only directly through its label Etcetera Records. A Web page for purchase has been created; but, since Etcetera is based in Belgium, the price is in euros. Under current conditions, it may be difficult to estimate how long delivery time will be.
In the accompanying booklet Monteiro observes that much of the content of the CD resulted from an eight-year collaboration between Stravinsky and the violist Samuel Dushkin. What he seems to have overlooked is that all of the selections have connections to the evolution of modern ballet along a path with Michel Fokine and one end and George Balanchine at the other. Fokine created two of the ballets explicitly named in the track listing from which Stravinsky extracted arrangements for violin and piano: “The Firebird” and “Petrushka,” both choreographed for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Other Ballets Russes choreographers are Léonide Massine (“Pulcinella,” movements of which were extracted for the Suite italienne) and Bronislava Nijinska, whose “Le baiser de la fée” (the fairy’s kiss) provided music for a concert suite, which Stravinsky subsequently arranged as a divertimento for Dushkin.
That leaves only one “pure” composition on the album, the “Duo Concertant,” which Stravinsky composed for Dushkin in 1932. Stravinsky performed this piece with him at its premiere in Berlin, and it became a fixture in recitals that the two of them gave for the next several years. However, when Balanchine planned a Stravinsky Festival to be performed by the New York City Ballet in 1972, he created choreography for “Duo Concertant” as part of the project. Balanchine honored the title by creating a ballet for only two dancers, Kay Mazzo and Peter Martins at the premiere performance. As if to honor also Stravinsky’s original intentions, they shared the stage with the violinist and pianist. I have seen this ballet many times, and it remains etched in memory as one of the finest examples of Balanchine’s understanding of the music behind his choreography.
Those familiar with the ballet repertoire will probably recall the episodes behind the excerpts from both “The Firebird” and “Petrushka.” One may miss the rich orchestration, but Stravinsky certainly knew how to distill the essence of his own music. Monteiro consistently captures that essence in ways that will appeal to both concertgoers and ballet lovers.
In “Pulcinella,” however, we see one of the earliest moves away from Russian tradition into what came to be called “neoclassicism.” Under Diaghilev’s influence, Stravinsky thought he was creating a score based on the music of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi. Pergolesi was a very popular composer in his day, but he died of tuberculosis at the age of 26. In an effort not to lose his “cash cow,” his publisher hired other musicians to create further additions to the Pergolesi catalog; and these deceptions were not unravelled until musicological research in the twentieth century. Regardless of actual sources, however, Stravinsky endowed eighteenth-century Italian traditions with a bevy of twentieth-century twists; and those twists can be easily relished in Monteiro’s account of them.
The score for “Le baiser de la fée,” throws retrospection into an entirely different light. In this case Stravinsky drew his source material from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and I have to confess that this particular ballet score never really registered with me until I had become familiar with most of those sources. Now this is one of my favorite Stravinsky compositions, and I enjoy recognizing the Tchaikovsky “roots” in Stravinsky’s chamber music version as much as I enjoy them when watching the ballet. I suspect it would be fair to say that this was the portion of the album that evoked some of my fondest memories.
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