Bard Music Festival Celebrates 'Stravinsky and His World'

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. - Sometimes the Bard Music Festival has an agenda.

The 2011 festival, "Sibelius and His World," took a composer often perceived as a provincial reactionary and sought to present him as cosmopolitan and cutting-edge. Last year's subject, Saint-Saëns, has drifted to the margins of music history; the festival tried to recapture the centrality he once enjoyed.

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) needs no such assistance. As the omnipresent commemorations of the centenary of "The Rite of Spring" have shown, his innovations are inescapable, his significance undeniable. This year's Bard festival, "Stravinsky and His World," which began this past weekend and continues on Friday, could relax, as it were, and simply celebrate him.

But what should it celebrate? The essential "Rite," sure, but what else? Despite his enduring celebrity, Stravinsky's protean output and ceaseless, shrewd self-reinventions can be difficult to capture.

The opening concert on Friday gave a sense of his dizzying range, from the quiet lullaby "Pastorale" (1907) to the rich, reverberant choruses of "Les Noces" (1914-23) to the spiky serial cantata "Abraham and Isaac" (1962-63). At a panel discussion on Saturday, Christopher H. Gibbs, a professor of music at Bard, suggested that given such a capacious artist, a more accurate title for the festival might be "Stravinsky and His Worlds."

Those worlds can be broadly defined as Russia (where he was from), France (where he became a star) and the United States (where he became an eminence). While the festival is organized not quite chronologically - there were some late works in the opening days and some important early pieces are still to come - the first weekend essentially brought him from St. Petersburg to Paris, ending amid the Surrealists of the 1920s.

In his later years, Stravinsky strategically underplayed Russia's influence on him and his work; he wanted to be thought of, his biographer Stephen Walsh writes, as "a phenomenon without a history." For a long time many believed him. Richard Taruskin's magisterial 1996 study, "Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions," changed all that, painstakingly demonstrating the composer's debts to his homeland and its music.

The weekend's concerts were suffused with Mr. Taruskin's research, showing the influence of impassioned 19th-century songs and arias by Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky on early Stravinsky works like the solo vocal scene "The Faun and the Shepherdess" (1906-7). The scoring of an 1832 Glinka trio for clarinet, bassoon and piano emphasized the country lilt of its melodies, an elegant folk idiom that Stravinsky would echo in his one-act comic opera "Mavra" (1921-22), charmingly performed on Sunday.

The perpetual motion and glinting colors of Rachmaninoff's Opus 23 piano preludes (1901-3) would return in Stravinsky's Concerto for Two Pianos (1935), given an unusually lyrical performance on Friday by Anna Polonsky and Orion Weiss. "Petrushka," performed by Piers Lane in the virtuosic arrangement that Stravinsky made for the pianist Arthur Rubinstein, shows the mark of both Mussorgsky's "Fair at Sorochintsy" (1874-80) and "Balagan" ("The Showbooth"), a 1909 tenor monologue by Stravinsky's little-known contemporary Mikhail Gnesin.

The careful programming made clear both how much Stravinsky owed these Russian models - how much he was a product of his time - and how he pushed past them. Saturday evening's concert was crammed with shining, Technicolor orchestral excerpts from rarities like Rimsky-Korsakov's opera "The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh" (1907), Anatoly Lyadov's Wagnerian, hysterical "Fragment From the Apocalypse" (1910-12) and Maximilian Steinberg's ballet "Les Métamorphoses" (1913). (Sergei Taneyev's majestic opera from the 1880s and '90s, "Oresteia," performed at Bard a few weeks ago, is of this ilk.)

If these works are lush, lurid wedding cakes, heavy on the frosting, then "The Rite of Spring," which closed the concert, is simultaneously the cake and the knife that cuts it. It revels in folk melodies and Rimsky-Korsakov-style grandeur while deconstructing both with a savage energy that was captured well by the conductor Leon Botstein and his American Symphony Orchestra, the festival's house ensemble, which was in excellent form all weekend.

With Stravinsky's increasing presence in Western Europe in the 1910s came new circles of experimentation and influence. A chamber-music concert Sunday afternoon illustrated the impact of Schoenberg's 1912 song cycle "Pierrot Lunaire" by following it with works by Ravel, Maurice Delage and Stravinsky, whose "Trois Poésies de la Lyrique Japonaise" (1913) and "Pribaoutki" (1914) show him ingesting and developing Schoenberg's striking text settings and kaleidoscopic instrumental accompaniment. The same program featured a selection of brief, somber works by Stravinsky, de Falla, Ravel, Bartok and Satie originally collected to honor the death of Debussy, who had borrowed from Stravinsky ("The Firebird" and "Petrushka," especially) in piano works like "En Blanc et Noir."

Late Sunday afternoon, the weekend's closing performance, semi-staged with evocative projections was a reminder of the embrace of popular sounds and the close relationships among the arts in Paris at the time, exemplified in works like "Le Travail du Peintre," Poulenc's setting of Paul Éluard's poems about contemporary painters, and "Parade," Satie's collaboration with Picasso, Cocteau, Massine, Apollinaire and Diaghilev. In this context and after a weekend showing the constant interplay of tradition and innovation in Stravinsky's work, "Mavra" was the ideal conclusion, savvily poised between nostalgia and modernity.

One of the best parts of the Bard festival is the opportunity to hear artists again and again. The tenor Nicholas Phan had committed presence and rich tone in both "Mavra" and "Balagan," and the soprano Kiera Duffy was as incisive in "Pierrot Lunaire" on Sunday as she was on Friday in Stravinsky's 1966 setting of "The Owl and the Pussycat."

The baritone John Hancock made thorny works like "Abraham and Isaac" and "Pribaoutki" alluring; the soprano Lei Xu sang with clear tone and diction in songs by Delage and Stravinsky. A series of fine pianists included Lucille Chung and Alessio Bax, and on Saturday the young Dover Quartet played Glazunov's "Five Novelettes" with calm command.

Next weekend brings Stravinsky from pre- World War II Paris to Los Angeles, his home after 1940. Chamber music will be well represented, with programs focusing on the music of the Machine Age, the circle of Eastern European expatriates in Paris and Stravinsky's influence. One full-orchestra concert focuses on his American period and features a late masterpiece, the "Requiem Canticles"; the closing performance juxtaposes two stage works from the 1920s and '30s on classical themes: "Perséphone" and "Oedipus Rex."

An unlikely event this past weekend most richly suggested this daunting scope: a screening of R. O. Blechman's 1984 animated film version of "The Soldier's Tale," with a live accompaniment conducted by Geoffrey McDonald. Mr. Blechman's visual references stretch from peasant Russia to the space age, from Kandinsky to LPs - in other words, over the many decades of Stravinsky's eventful life. Uproarious and affecting, the film is as mutable and insatiably imaginative as he was.

The Bard Music Festival concludes on Sunday at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.; (845) 758-7900,

fishercenter.bard.edu.