A Stravinsky Story
A Stravinsky Story with a classic Ormandy Quotable.
During the 1960s, I participated in a couple of Los Angeles performances and recording sessions of the music of Igor Stravinsky conducted by the composer. Stravinsky maintained a home in L.A. and did a number of concerts/sessions in the area during those years, beginning in the 1950s. My participation in those festivities was minimal, but I did come away with a couple of good stories from that period.
A personal favorite involves a friend's experience with the cornet part to L’Histoire du Soldat.
In 1960, one of my college roommates, Chuck (Charles) Brady, who had performed the piece on a number of occasions with Stravinsky conducting, was scheduled to play the well-known cornet part on a Columbia Records recording of the piece, also with the “old man” conducting (eventually released as an LP, “Stravinsky 1961”).
Most trumpeters are familiar with some of the notational discrepancies in the part, which have been commonly attributed, correctly or not, to the fact the original manuscript had not been carefully copied and edited. Among those discrepancies are the correct articulation of the quintuplets in the Royal March, where the graphic placement of the slur/phrase markings relative to the numerical 5 poses a “slurred or tongued” question, and the staccato eighth note markings (when beamed to two preceding sixteenths) under the slur arc in the Little Concert (rearticulated or simply short).
One of the “official” lines of trumpet cognoscenti during those days with respect to the articulation of the quintuplets was that if one played them on a cornet, they were to be slurred, whereas if one used a trumpet, they were to be tongued. (The fact today’s professional players and students typically and predictably roll their eyes when hearing such nonsense is indicative of how far trumpeters have come since those pathetic times.)
In an effort to clarify the cornet notation for what was intended at the time to be the definitive L’Histoire recording conducted by the composer, Stravinsky worked with Brady for over an hour in an one-on-one session during which time the maestro specified the articulations for the complete cornet part*. Consequently, it would be fair to assert the recording, which was subsequently released in the CD format, does indeed represent the definitive performance of the cornet part, at least in terms of the composer’s stated notational intentions. And yet, there have been untold numbers of performers/performances since that time that have ignored this fact. Indeed, during a 1997 master class on the subject, a student who should have known better by virtue of his educational background offered the opinion he did not agree with Brady’s “interpretation.”
Say what?
Stravinsky conducted the group for the recording. His longtime chief collaborator, Robert Craft, was in attendance throughout the project and assisted the "old man" by doing some of the conducting during rehearsals. In addition, the Columbia Records producer and his staff obviously supervised every aspect of the festivities. Any suggestion or inference that within the confines of such an environment, Charles Brady, at the ripe old age of twenty-two, would or could have played anything that would not have been strictly in accordance with Stravinsky’s expressed wishes or approval could only come from someone lacking an awareness of the extremely disciplined manner with which Stravinsky and his subordinates went about their tasks of preparing/presenting performances of the old man's music, especially during the composer's later years, for obvious, yet unspoken, reasons.
My response to the student's “Brady interpretation” comment during the class was essentially as follows: Disagree all you want-you most certainly have the right to express your own opinion on the subject. As a musician, however, you also have an obligation to have at least a fleeting awareness and understanding of any musical subjects with which you have issues or opinions. In this particular case, you are disagreeing with Stravinsky, not Brady. This is significant, and if you will forgive my Californian survival Spanish, that requires a substantial cojónes coefficient, reminding one of the following Quotable:
- (regarding the interpretation of a passage from a Stravinsky work)........ "That's the way Stravinsky was--bup,bup,bup. The poor guy's dead now, so play it legato."-Maestro Eugene Ormandy, from the printed and publicily disseminated Ormandy comments/quotes made by the conductor to the Philadelphia Orchestra. (The rumors the maestro kept a red and white copy of Picasso's "The Old Guitarist" on the wall of his office are totally unfounded.)
And so it goes!
*In 1997, while preparing a master class on the L’Histoire cornet part, I spoke via telephone with Chuck Brady, who confirmed the facts and my memories regarding the subject. This post is based in part on materials from the notes prepared for that class.
Update: One of Robert Nagel's students related a story to me about how Stravinsky had heard Mr. Nagel tonguing the famous quintuplets (during a rehearsal) and decided that's how he, the composer, had arrived at the final decision to have them articulated. Since the Columbia Records version on which Nagel played the cornet part was recorded at least three years before the Brady version, and since I, along with many other musicians, personally witnessed Stravinsky contradicting his own editing on other occasions (an example of which is mentioned in another post in these Quotables pages-Two Masters of Tempi), the Nagel story may indeed be true. Contrary to the opinion of the Nagel student, however, that would not, in any way, contradict the witnessed accounts of what took place during, or the validity of the Brady experience.
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