In Praise of Tradition - part 6

There is finally a movement in Russia to claim Stravinsky back as a Great Russian Composer rather than the great cosmopolitan chameleon he's been known as for the last ninety years. No great composer was harmed by exile more than Stravinsky, and as his career continued he gradually severed his links with all the material that made his music compelling. It was bad enough that his music shunned the Russian roots that gave us Petrouchka and The Rite of Spring, but eventually Stravinsky even shunned the neoclassical techniques that animated his music through his exile. He became known as a composer of cool, arid music, he made a famous pronouncement that music was incapable of expressing feeling. And yet his own music betrayed enormous feeling, and nowhere moreso than in Les Noces. Stravinsky's depiction of a Russian peasant wedding is both his most exciting piece of music and his farewell to Russia. Never again would he be able to write a piece that stood the world on its head. And after eighty-five years, we finally have a real Russian performance of it. Valery Gergiev gets his forces from the Mariinsky (Kirov) Opera to play the piece faster, louder, stronger and more explosively than any performer has ever done it. This is how Les Noces ought to sound every time.