Rite of Spring.(Stravinsky Festival)(Concert review)

Miller Theatre's Stravinsky Festival, a five-concert tribute to the undefeated champion of musical modernism, began with a witty and touching conceit that captured the composer's impish spirit. At first glance, the opening concert, which took place at the Morgan Library, seemed to be an odd melange of Stravinsky, early, middle, and late. Members of the International Contemporary Ensemble, or ICE, gave fired-up performances under the rhythmically vibrant baton of Jayce Ogren, but the sequence felt disconcertingly random, as if Stravinsky's collected works were playing on Shuffle. First, the "Dumbarton Oaks" Concerto, from 1937-38; then the "Eight Instrumental Miniatures," completed in Los Angeles in 1962; and the Concertino, "Ragtime," and the Octet, all from the period 1917-23. Soon, though, I noticed that the number of music stands was diminishing, from fifteen to twelve to eleven to eight, and the organizing principle became clear. The concert might have been titled "And Then There Were None," after the Agatha Christie novel, in which country-house guests are killed off one by one. Following intermission came the Septet; the Pastorale for violin and four winds; the Three Pieces for String Quartet; and various trios, duos, and solos. The last few items were heard without a break: two trumpet players positioned above the stage performed "Fanfare for a New Theatre" before handing off to two bassoonists at the back of the hall, who offered up the "Lied Ohne Name" and yielded to Joshua Rubin, who ambled in to render the Three Pieces for clarinet. By the end, only a piano remained. A stagehand placed music on the desk, and the piano, with the aid of Disklavier technology, executed the Etude for pianola, from 1917. In the mind's eye, Stravinsky got up to take a bow.

The first great virtue of the Miller festival, which, in a Stravinskyish journey of exile, abandoned its parent venue and unfolded variously at the Morgan, St.Bartholomew's Church, and the Park Avenue Armory, was that it steered clear of the hits. Stravinsky hardly suffers from neglect--he ranked ninth on the League of American Orchestras' most recent list of frequently performed composers--but his early ballet scores are the main engine of his popularity; much of his vast catalogue languishes unheard. After the opening cavalcade of rarities, ICE returned to participate in a program of Stravinsky's songs, ranging from "Storm Cloud," of 1902, to "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat," of 1966. Two subsequent programs, in the chapel at St. Bartholomew's, surveyed works for one and two pianos and for violin and piano. And, in the central offering, George Steel, the Miller's director, conducted the Vox Vocal Ensemble and the Gotham City Orchestra in a mostly sacred program: the Mass, "Requiem Canticles," the Variations, and "Symphony of Psalms." The "Canticles," Stravinsky's hard-edged, tenderhearted farewell, has long been counted among his greatest achievements, and yet, by my count, New Yorkers have heard it only about once a decade.

The festival's second virtue was to free Stravinsky from the tyranny of style--the master narrative of his progression through various twentieth-century techniques, from late Romanticism to dissonant folklorism and on to musical surrealism, neoclassicism, grand opera, and twelve-tone writing. Seen from that angle, the composer resembles a canny cabinet minister in an unstable banana republic who maintains his position through successive Communist, fascist, and democratic regimes. Yet Stravinsky was also a painstaking artisan, whose fastidiousness often undermined his popular appeal. If fame had been his ultimate goal, he would hardly have spent so much time devising quirky confections for impractical combinations of instruments. The Miller festival, by jettisoning chronology in favor of formal groupings (chamber works, songs, and so on), provided an unusually intimate encounter with a man who habitually presented a cool, circumspect profile to the world.

Most listeners, myself included, first encountered this repertory on recordings. Our view of Stravinsky has long been refracted through an electronic ...