Stravinsky Conducts Firebird

Take a minute or 3 to enjoy the master conducting his own work... here's some rare footage of the 82 year old Igor Stravinsky conducting Firebird.



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The Bad Boys of Classical:

Is 21^st-century wunderkind Nico Muhly the rightful heir to Stravinsky’s legacy?

By Claire Willett

Igor Stravinsky

Nico Muhly

The Game-Changer

“One spring evening in 1913 the intelligentsia of pre-war Paris gathered at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées to see & hear a sensational new ballet. The ballet, put on by famed Russian Impresario Serge Diaghilev, was something to see: Diaghilev's idea of how primitive man got ritually excited, come springtime. The accompanying music, a boisterous, tom-tomming, banshee-wailing symphonic hullabaloo by Music's No. 1 Bad Boy, Igor Stravinsky, had even more oomph than the ballet . . . [He] found himself the most influential composer of his generation. To younger composers [The Rite of Spring] became music's Declaration of Independence.”

--TIME Magazine, March 1940

The 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring has gone down in history as one of classical music’s greatest scandals. From the first bassoon notes, the Parisians in attendance were beside themselves; stories abound (some historically verified, some probably urban legend) of celebrity guests storming out of the theatre, hooting and hollering from the galleries, fights breaking out in the audience, Stravinsky escaping through a basement window to dodge the rioting crowds. “One English critic described it as ‘a threat against the foundations of our tonal institutions,’ declaring that it should have been dedicated to Dr. Crippen, a dentist celebrated for murdering his wife, cutting her body in pieces.” (TIME Magazine 1940) But whether the stories are apocryphal or not, there is no denying that posterity has kept Rite of Spring a fresh, relevant, and vital piece of music, even in the 21^st century. “If you listen to it, it’s amazing it’s nearly 100 years old,” says Evan Lewis of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. “Other things happening in 1913 include the invention of the crossword puzzle and the modern zipper. It’s funny to think that something from 1913 is still considered ‘modern.’ Woodrow Wilson was president, for goodness sake.”

Yes, there will only ever be one Stravinsky.

But like every other genre-defying artist since the earliest days of Western civilization, the cultural world is constantly champing at the bit to designate an heir-apparent; there’s always some young up-and-comer to be dubbed “the next Chekhov,” “the next Picasso,” or “the next John Lennon.” And because Stravinsky is so quintessentially, well, Stravinsky, we’re hesitant to play that game. So all we’ll say is: if you find Stravinsky interesting and engaging (the man and the music), we recommend you look into 29-year-old Nico Muhly, who might just be the hardest-working young composer you’ve never heard of.

The Genre-Bender

“Talking about genres is [pointless]. Pretend your mom is from India and your dad is from Iceland or wherever, and you move to New York and you’re just a young family trying to make it work and you make dinner, you have kids, and whenever people come over they talk about it being fusion-y. ‘Ohh, this is, like, India meets Iceland,’ and you’re all like, ‘No, it’s just what we like making for the kids.’”

--Nico Muhly

Nico Muhly (profiled here in two hugely entertaining interviews with New York Magazine in 2007 and the New Yorker in 2008 was born in rural Vermont in 1981 to an artist mother and filmmaker father, and grew up traveling the world with his globetrotting parents. Now splitting his time between New York and Iceland, he is one of the classical world’s rising stars, with a trajectory (and a personality) that seems to echo Stravinsky’s. He frequently collaborates or consults with pop stars and indie bands (“Bad string arrangements in rock music are a blight on all of our ears”), and like Stravinsky before him, bodes well to be a classical music megastar before 30. He is the youngest composer ever commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera (Two Boys, his collaboration with librettist Craig Lucas, is based on the true story of a British murder case from the late 1990s). Muhly shares Stravinsky’s diversity of musical influences; though his day job involves working in a digital sound studio for composer Phillip Glass, his passion is 400-year-old Anglican liturgical music. In his wry, witty 2007 essay in the U.K. Guardian, “Choral Sex,” he talks about finding himself alienated from the classical music traditions he was taught as a young student, and discovering a more immediate emotional connection to music from centuries earlier . . . a sentiment that echoes Stravinsky’s saying that “It's one of nature's ways that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us.”

“An Unclassifiable Musical Voice”

“Stravinsky never stopped adapting his style,” Lewis says. “He was always striving, always innovating.” The composer’s stylistic diversity is well-known (to the point of accusations from critics that his body of work had no consistency), ranging from his compositions for the Ballets Russe (Firebird, Petrushka, Rite of Spring) to his neo-classical period (shifting away from large ballet orchestras towards piano and chamber works) to the adoption of twelve-tone/atonal music later in life. Muhly, whose career is already similarly varied, has composed everything from film scores (including The Reader, which earned star Kate Winslet a Best Actress Oscar), to settings of 17^th-century Anglican choral music, to arrangements for Icelandic pop singer Bjork. One of the tracks on his album Mothertongue blends an English folk ballad with the sounds of a pair of butcher’s knives scraping against each other, a recording of whistling Icelandic wind, and the sound of raw whale flesh slopping around a bowl. Another includes music looped over the voice of his friend singing strings of words, numbers and addresses. Both were surprisingly witty: Stravinsky’s “Greeting Prelude” is a clever reorchestration of “Happy Birthday,” while Muhly made waves with a song cycle based on Strunck & White’s writing manual The Elements of Style, performed at the New York Public Library. “What I really like about both composers,” says Lewis, “is their ability to write self-aware, difficult & intellectually complex music (Muhly’s By All Means, Stravinsky’s Agon), while still being able to compose deeply affecting and beautiful music (Muhly’s Senex puerum poratbat, Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms). They prove that a wicked and probing mind can also have an earnest, thoughtful, pious side—both are merely different aspects of a larger and interesting and unclassifiable musical voice.”

Stravinsky tells us how he really feels about film music:

PART 1

PART 2

TIME Magazine Profile on Stravinsky Written By Philip Glass

Muhly’s Hilarious and Awesome Blog

Download OBT's favorite Stravinsky and Muhly music

IGOR & NICO SOUND OFF ON . . .

The creative process

“The real composer thinks about his work the whole time; he is not always conscious of this, but he is aware of it later when he suddenly knows what he will do.” – Igor

When asked, “How do you compose?”: “I’m a pack rat; I make these little piles of documents, a lot of documents – very little music paper involved, it’s all much later. It’s images, it’s drawings, it’s numbers, it’s schemes, it’s food, it’s almost never music.” – Nico

Film scores

“Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading.” - Igor

People often ask me if it’s some sort of dream to be involved in the movie business, but it’s not really. I’m not an enormous movies fan. I feel like I have something better to do for two hours. [Most film scores are] just explicit manipulation.” – Nico

The music they DON’T like

“Every couple of years someone sues someone else for having ripped off their song, and I always follow those cases very intently. Now, it’s Joe Satriani v Coldplay, which is hilarious. The thing with Coldplay is: the reason their music is so successful is that it sounds like you’ve heard it before anyway. So, it’s almost like a constant intellectual copyright violation.” – Nico

“Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune.” – Igor

The freedom of artistic constraint

“One of the hardest things about writing music now is that structure is politically loaded, thanks in part to everybody's bad attitude in the 60s and 70s . . . I know that there’s this belief that structural knowledge can be creatively limiting, but I think the exact opposite.” – Nico

“The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.” – Igor

Knowing when to stop

“Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.” – Igor

“The biggest question for me has always been, always, whatever I’m doing: is this, this thing I’m working on, is it preferable to silence? If someone tells me to write twelve minutes for orchestra, whatever I make had better to be so great that it deserves to exist. If people could spend twelve minutes sitting around in their house and have a better time, then I’ll cut it. You know, a lot of music is not preferable to silence.” – Nico

Inspiration from the past

“My love for Thomas Weelkes was like a childish celebrity infatuation. If the internet had existed, I would have been running the Weelkes fan site and moderating the message boards. There was something about his 400-year-old music that felt so right in the throat and brain; I would have followed him on tour and lit my lighter during When David Heard. I'd have told all my friends that he had written the Ninth Service for me.” – Nico

“It's one of nature's ways that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us.” – Igor

Personal indulgences

“My God, so much I like to drink Scotch that sometimes I think my name is Igor Stra-whiskey.” – Igor

“I only buy expensive food. If you’re paying an exorbitant amount of money for something, chances are it’s good.” – Nico

Don’t overthink it

“The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music they should be taught to love it instead.” – Igor

“Talking about genres is [pointless]. Pretend your mom is from India and your dad is from Iceland or wherever, and you move to New York and you’re just a young family trying to make it work and you make dinner, you have kids, and whenever people come over they talk about it being fusion-y. ‘Ohh, this is, like, India meets Iceland,’ and you’re all like, ‘No, it’s just what we like making for the kids.’” - Nico

Instinct

“One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.” – Igor

“My mother goes to the store not knowing what to cook, she’ll just buy the stuff that looks good and mixes it all together into something amazing. And that’s kind of how you have to be, a mix of instinct and insight. We might be eating this cauliflower anchovy thing; even if it sounds f***ed up you know it’ll be genius by accident.” – Nico

Trends in music

“Anytime you read a sentence about classical music with the formula ‘_______ is dead’ it’s almost always written by some kind of revolutionary or reactionary or crazy person. My response to this — and really to most meta-figurations about music — is to put my fingers in my ears and apply myself to the business of continuing to write good music.” – Nico

“Conformism is so hot on the heels of the mass-produced avant-garde that the 'ins' and the 'outs' change places with the speed of Mach 3.” – Igor

The Stravinsky Project opens February 26th at the Keller Auditorium.

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Stravinsky Costume Renderings

Last time we talked about all the amazing collaborators that are coming together to bring The Stravinsky Project to the stage. Choreographers, composers, designers - when you count them all up we have over a half dozen for this one world premiere.

As promised, we are revealing some of the original costume renderings for The Stravinsky Project from designer Morgan Walker. Feast your eyes on these beauties...







First of all, I am in love with these drawings. The sketches are so gorgeous it reminds me of my favorite time during each episode of Project Runway when everyone hunkers down for a mere seven minutes and produces amazing sketches like it's nothing. Also, these are the most avant-garde costumes to come out of the OBT costume shop in some time, maybe ever. Second runner up might be these from Julia Adam's Angelo, which featured removable felt panels - but they are still pretty standard compared to these Stravinsky renderings.

Just as fascinating are the references I'm seeing in the drawings: can-can girls, kits, hoop skirts... superheros? What else do you see?


The Stravinsky Project runs February 26 to March 5 at Portland's Keller Auditorium.

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In studio with "The Stravinsky Project"

The Stravinsky Project is right around the corner and everyone in the building is especially curious about how the new work, (also titled) The Stravinsky Project is going to look. The piece is a collaboration between Choreographers Jamey Hampton and Ashley Roland (BodyVox), Rachel Tess (Rumpus Room Dance), OBT's own Anne Mueller PLUS original live electronic music composition by Heather Perkins (Water Dog Studio) and costume design by artist and professor Morgan Walker (PNCA).

Oh right, and it is set to Stravinsky's music. That's one doozy of a collaboration.

Here are some peeks at how this has been playing out in the studio.

L-R: Brian Simcoe, Christian Squires, Alison Roper, Steven Houser,
Candace Bouchard and Lucas Threefoot in The Stravinsky Project rehearsal.
Photo by Blaine Truitt Covert.


L-R: Brian Simcoe, Alison Roper, Candace Bouchard,
Lucas Threefoot and Christian Squires in The Stravinsky Project rehearsal.
Photo by Blaine Truitt Covert.

Choreographer Jamey Hampton and Candace Bouchard
in The Stravinsky Project rehearsal. Photo by Blaine Truitt Covert.

Choreographer Jamey Hampton (foreground) and Alison Roper
in The Stravinsky Project rehearsal. Photo by Blaine Truitt Covert.

Choreographer Jamey Hampton, Alison Roper and company
in The Stravinsky Project rehearsal. Photo by Blaine Truitt Covert.

So what do you think, does it look like you'd expect?


See the finished work in The Stravinsky Project opening February 26th.


Next up, costume design renderings...

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5 Fun Facts About Igor Stravinsky

Facts compliments of Maestro DePonte

1. At one point, Stravinsky lived in a Swiss hotel, but wouldn't compose there unless he was sure no one could hear him - which was rare. Later, a dealer set him up with a piano which was kept in a combination lumber storage-chicken coop. In the coop/lumber yard he composed some of his most famous works.

2. Stravinsky was romantically linked to Coco Chanel - a relationship that's explored in the 2009 film Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky. (Inspired title, right?)

3. Stravinsky was known for ruthlessly promoting his music in order to support his lavish lifestyle. One of his triumphs was the inclusion of Rite of Spring in Walt Disney's Fantasia. He also composed a commissioned work for dancing elephants which eventually become George Balanchine's Circus Polka. Stravinsky was able to negotiate a high commission from the circus for his composition.

Bonus actual Balanchine/Stravinsky elephant conversation transcript:

Balanchine: "I wonder if you'd like to do a little ballet with me."

Stravinsky: "For whom?"

Balanchine: "For some elephants."

Stravinsky: "How old?"

Balanchine: "Very young."

Stravinsky: "All right. If they are very young elephants, I will do it."

4. The audience protest at the 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring was so loud that neither the dancers nor the audience could properly hear the music.

5. Towards the end of his life, Stravinsky became especially fond of the game Scrabble. Bonus question: How many points is "Stravinsky" worth?

Get all the Stravinsky you can handle at OBT's The Stravinsky Project opening February 26th.

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Gavin Larsen in Fertile Ground Festival 2011

Fertile Ground 2011 is a ten-day arts festival celebrating new work by Portland artists. This year’s festival will feature over 50 Portland-generated new works, along with a myriad of other arts events from Portland’s creative community. From fully-staged world premieres in theatre, to ensemble and collaborative driven work, dance, comedy, visual art and film, this festival spans the spectrum of creative endeavor and seeds the next generation of creation through artist conversations, workshops, lunchtime readings and more.

Oregon Ballet Theatre staff and dancers will be participating in world premiere works all over town on seven of the ten days of the festival. Below is a choreographer interview with OBT's own Gavin Larsen about her work for the Fertile Ground Festival, from Fertile Ground's Blog written by OBT's own Claire Willett

NAME: Gavin Larsen
PROJECT: A Ghost In the Room With Us

A Ghost In the Room With Us plays at 7 pm on Wednesday, January 26th and 6pm on Sunday, January 30th at Conduit (918 SW Yamhill, 4th Floor). Tickets are $15. More info here.

ABOUT GAVIN
Gavin Larsen has danced with Pacific Northwest Ballet, Alberta Ballet, the Suzanne Farrell Ballet, Ballet Victoria and most recently as a principal dancer with Oregon Ballet Theatre. She is thrilled to continue exploring the limitless language of dance by incorporating, considering, and learning from the distinct dialects of her fellow artists and collaborators, David Biespiel and Joshua Pearl. Gavin is currently on the faculty of the School of Oregon Ballet Theatre.


EIGHT ONE-WORD ANSWERS
1. A Choreographer I Admire Is . . . I admire anyone with the bravery to create dance!
2. My Choreographic Style Can Be Described As . . . “Gavin Larsen the Dancer” Meets “Gavin Larsen speaking without words”
3. A Portland Artist I Admire Is . . . Josie Moseley
4. I Am Terrified Of . . . Feeling trapped
5. I Am Obsessed With . . . Moving and expanding outside the boundaries of my own skin
6. The Book Currently On My Nightstand Is . . . Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon
7. Three Adjectives That Describe This Play Are . . . Thought-Provoking, Classic, Beautiful
8. In the Indie Art-House Biographical Film Of My Life, I Should Be Played By . . . [EDITOR’S NOTE: Gavin didn’t answer this question, but Claire feels strongly that she should be played by Embeth Davidtz. If you've seen Matilda and have met Gavin, you will agree with her.]


FIVE QUESTIONS OF DEPTH AND SUBSTANCE
1. Tell us about your Fertile Ground Festival project.
Three of us, poet David Biespiel, dancer Gavin Larsen, and musician Joshua Pearl — the trio that call themselves Incorporamento — are returning to the Fertile Ground Festival with a collaboration of original poetry, dance, and music, “A Ghost in the Room with Us.” Building on last year’s heralded Fertile Ground performance, we’re trying to allow audiences to interpret performance in a new way. We’re defining and fusing the lines between three classic forms of art. “A Ghost in the Room with Us” burns with recollection, introspection, and meditative reverie in a fabulous performance of renewal, insight, and pleasure.

2. How did this piece come about? What inspired it?
As soon as last year’s FG Festival shows ended, we were already talking about what we would do next. We knew we wanted to move to a more polished and fully produced show, much more in-depth, and include both original and existing work. We kept meeting to have “jam sessions” all spring and summer, and the pieces in this show are the results. We’re inspired by the concept of noticing that inner self that we all have, who travels with us through life, but is often as mysterious and effervescent as a ghost.

3. Talk about your creative process. (How do you work? When do you work? What gets you moving?)
We each work independently, and then bring something to the table, so to speak, at each rehearsal. Some of our pieces were born from the seed of a piece of music, some from one of David’s poems, and some from my movement. We blend them together without stepping all over each other’s work.

4. What is the most exciting/inspiring piece of live performance you’ve seen in Portland?
Honestly, it’s some of the OBT performances that I have either performed in or seen my colleagues do. I am routinely floored by the amount of talent and creativity in these studios.

5. What are you up to these days when you’re not creating?
I teach full-time at the School of OBT and coach the children that appear in any OBT production, so that has kept me very busy all fall and winter. When I’m not doing that, I’m refreshing my soul by moving my body and trying to live up to the high creative standards of Joshua and David. Doing this FG performance is like getting a drink of water after a long thirsty spell. I can’t stop gulping it down!

We are so proud to have so many OBT artists presenting work for the Fertile Ground Festival. Get your tickets or festival passes today!

Tell us what you think - What's the best part of seeing a world premiere performance?

Haiku Creations

Welcome to November, everyone! I had the opportunity to see the splendor of Fall in Boulder, Colorado this last weekend. A small group of nine dancers performed at the Macky Auditorium on Saturday night with four pieces, Tolstoy’s Waltz, Tarantella, Known by Heart Duet, and Like a Samba. Dancing at an elevation of 5,400 feet was a little bit of a challenge, but we all survived and the audience loved it. It was a very quick trip, there on Friday and back on Sunday.

On the plane ride home last night, as we were reflecting on our short time in the sunny, mountain city, we thought some poetry writing would be a good way to pass the time. The following haiku poems were written by four people (Anne, Brian, Javier, and Julia), each person writing one line without knowing what anybody else wrote, passing the paper around until we had amassed a collection of vignettes. We were quite surprised at how some of them turned out, so we thought we would share them with you. Enjoy!

thin fresh mountain air

flying upwards, deftly now

oxygen I breathe

the sheep with the star

stalls the creative process

swoosh powder flying

no one is alone

how did we get here from there?

where will we go now?

restless pattering

hot guy at gate forty-one

the hobo is rich

And, in fact, our second round was so amusing, we decided to present it as one massive haiku:

Backwards turkey eyes

the heat of the sun in Fall

in the woods we go

Snacking on the plane

women strut while hunting prey

a handful of friends

In the grass worms sing

eternally ungrateful

homeward quickly please

Kisses and crackers

if it tastes good keep eating

the drink of the gods

Vanity ruins us

golden leaves on sunlit trees

the wishes never come

Mile-high dancers

succulent tastes abound there

strangers in the night