Stravinsky
Introduced by PERCY SCHOLES
' STRAVINSKY ' — that
'word of fear unpleasing to '—many a listener's ear! Well, after all, is Stravinsky's music as bad as it sounds ?
There is some Stravinsky, at any rate, that commands the universal admiration of all who really know it. If the Russian Ballet announced Petrouchka or The Fire Bird in London next week, the theatre would be full. Those works date from sixteen or eighteen years back—just before The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du Brintemps), and other things that proclaimed a new manner ; long before The Soldier's Story (L'Histoire du Soldat) and other things that proclaimed a still newer one ; and still longer before the Piano Sonata and Piano Concerto that proclaimed the newest manner of all (to date, that is!) Stravinsky's output is as a ladder. Ernest Newman and some others say the topmost rungs are rotten and will not risk their nocks on them. But everybody who is anybody in the world of music has climbed a certain distance, and has proclaimed that from that height he could see beauty. Tonight you are to climb with me-with Stravinsky himself to lead the way. For I have persuaded the composer to record a typical work of the earlier period, the glowing, tuneful Fire Bird, as a series of pianola rolls, and to annotate them in words along their whole length. After some extracts from this piano version, I am going to give you the work (gramophonically reproduced) in its full dress of vivid orchestral colour. P. A. S.