Igor Stravinsky is not a composer i know terribly well, and honestly, that bothers me a bit. More than a bit, really. Stravinsky is considered to be the major bridge composer between the Romantic era and the Modern one. His art has its roots in the 19th century, but most of his work is fully conceived in the 20th, but it’s not generally as hard to crack, in my experience, as is the work of other Modernists like, say, Schoenberg, Berg, and later avant garde voices like Cage. Stravinsky worked in recognizable forms, for the most part, and his ballet music–perhaps his most famous and familiar works–represent some of the most starkly dramatic work for stage dance ever written. The Rite of Spring actually provoked a riot at its premiere, so there’s that.
Written for a ballet that was in turn based on Russian mythology and legend, The Firebird is one of Stravinsky’s most enduringly popular works. It comes fairly early in his career, and thus he was only just starting his life-long evolution into full-on Modernism. (Born in 1882, Stravinsky died roughly five months before I was born in 1971!) The Firebird tells its story with startlingly evocative orchestral writing, and it is by turns exotic and suggestive, weaving a spell with sonic imagery that borders on the purely impressionistic. While I don’t know Stravinsky well as a whole, The Firebird has endured in the repertoire for a reason.
Also popular is one of the three shorter orchestral suites Stravinsky culled from the pages of the entire ballet. This suite, the middle of the three, was put together by Stravinsky in 1919, and despite his later insistence that the score was riddled with errors, it it the 1919 suite that has endured of the three suites he created from the entire ballet. I do recommend the entire ballet; it’s only about 45 minutes long, which does make me wonder why Stravinsky felt the need for abridgements at all.
Some of the moodier music in The Firebird would later serve as partial inspiration for composer Cliff Eidelman, when he was tapped to score Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
