Stravinsky’s long and storied career took him from the drawing rooms of czarist St. Petersburg to the Tinseltown sound studios of Los Angeles. It was as a Russian nationalist that he rocketed to fame on the eve of World War I with a trio of colorful ballets—The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring—written for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. The Parisian Stravinsky of the 1920s and 1930s cut a more cosmopolitan figure, characterized by such coolly Neoclassical masterpieces as the ballet Apollo and the Violin Concerto in D. After emigrating to the United States in 1939, he reinvented himself, yet again, in works like his opera The Rake’s Progress and the spikily serial Movements for piano and orchestra.
The legendary premiere of The Rite of Spring took place on May 29, 1913. The incendiary combination of Stravinsky’s primitivistic music and Vaslav Nijinsky’s defiantly anti-balletic choreography nearly incited a riot at Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Subtitled “Pictures from Pagan Russia,” the ballet builds to a frenzied climax in which a sacrificial virgin dances herself to death in order to restore fertility to the soil. The playwright Jean Cocteau described The Rite as “a symphony impregnated with savage pathos, with earth in the throes of birth, noises of farm and camp, little melodies that come from the depths of the centuries, the panting of cattle, deep convulsions, prehistoric georgics.” Like Stravinsky’s Concerto for Two Pianos, which he performed with his pianist son Soulima when no orchestra was available, the composer’s piano reduction of the orchestral score was originally intended for use at dance rehearsals, but has since taken on a life of its own.
The fact that Stravinsky habitually composed at the piano helps explain his music’s crystalline and often percussive brilliance. It is these qualities, rather than the opulent colors of the symphonic score, that come across most powerfully in his four-hands arrangement of The Rite of Spring. (The conductor Pierre Monteux, who heard the composer play his score on the piano, recalled that “the very walls resounded as Stravinsky pounded away, occasionally stamping his feet and jumping up and down to accentuate the force of the music.”) There is no question of reproducing the sonic splendor of the original 99-piece orchestra, with its massive batteries of brass and percussion. Nor can the pianos mimic such unforgettable sounds as the weirdly denatured bassoon solo that opens the ballet or the blistering trombone glissandos in the “Spring Rounds” dance. On the other hand, Stravinsky’s pounding ostinatos and complex meters sound more sharply etched than ever in the keyboard version. The final Sacrificial Dance throbs with such nervous, twitching energy that the listener can almost feel the spasms of the doomed dancer’s body.
Born in Kharkiv and trained at the former Leningrad Conservatory, Leonid Desyatnikov built his career in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia before moving to Israel in the wake of Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2022. Over the course of the past half century, he has created an extensive catalog of music for the concert hall, stage, and film, much of which reflects a creative engagement with historical musical and literary styles and genres. In the 2009–2010 season, Desyatnikov served briefly as music director of the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, where his ballet Lost Illusions was first staged in 2011. (The New York City Ballet premiered his Russian Seasons in 2006.) He is best known for his 2005 opera The Children of Rosenthal, which centers around fictional clones of Tchaikovsky, Verdi, Mozart, and other composers. Desyatnikov has also demonstrated his gift for allusive parody in several works written for the violinist Gidon Kremer, including homages to the tango master Astor Piazzolla and Wie der alte Leiermann …, based on the final song of the organ grinder in Schubert’s Die Winterreise.
As the title might suggest, Trompe-l’oeil also takes its cue from pre-existing material—in this case, Schubert’s Fantasie in F Minor. Desyatnikov’s duet was commissioned for the Aldeburgh Festival in England, where tonight’s performers gave the premiere last summer. Pavel Kolesnikov explains that Trompe-l’oeil was conceived as a “reflection or doppelgänger” of Schubert’s Fantasie, “with the same structure and length. Desyatnikov left Russia immediately after the start of the invasion in Ukraine, for the first time in his life, and this was, I imagine, the first major work created in the turmoil. Trompe-l’oeil is a melting pot of cultural references and memories, an anguished, elegiac, and deeply affecting masterwork.”
The composer himself writes of his work:
You can envisage my piece as the follow-up to or the rough draft of Schubert’s Fantaisie. Something incomplete. Like a study for a composition that’s been abandoned en route. In Milan, in the church of Santa Maria presso San Satiro, I discovered a deceptive piece of architecture that was a great inspiration for me. From the entrance hall, you can see the fresco on the altar. From a distance, it looks like a lump of tiramisu. But when you come closer, you discover that this apparently formless mass is made up of ornaments of great clarity and is of a perfectly geometric design. I should like my Trompe l’œil to be discovered as though you were standing in the porch of the church; and that the structure would not be obvious at once to the naked eye but to emerge, progressively, to the person walking towards it.
Although the layout and dimensions of Trompe-l’œilclosely match those of Schubert’s F-Minor Fantasie, Desyatnikov’s music is cut from a very different tonal cloth. Consider the most salient point of resonance between the two works: the wistful, lightly skipping tune in dotted rhythm that gives Schubert’s masterpiece much of its melancholy poignancy. Desyatnikov abstracts this terse rhythmic motto into a kind of musical Morse code that runs throughout the piece—like an idée fixe. Other obsessively repetitive elements in the score bear out the composer’s own characterization of his style as “minimalism with a human face.” Trompe-l’œil is strewn with such fragmentary allusions to Schubert’s work—flickering trills, chirping grace notes, softly billowing melodic lines—and has a similar four-part structure. The last section is a free fugato loosely based on Schubert’s analogous fugue.
Unlike the great composer-pianists of the 19th century—like Beethoven, Chopin, and Liszt—Schubert was by all accounts a less-than-stellar keyboard player. There seems no reason to question the judgment of the contemporary composer (and virtuoso pianist) Ferdinand Hiller that he “had but little technique.” On the other hand, Schubert’s brother Ferdinand testified that “although Schubert never represented himself as a virtuoso, any connoisseur who had the chance of hearing him in private circles will nevertheless attest that he knew how to treat the instrument with mastery and in a quite peculiar manner, so that a great specialist in music, to whom he once played his last sonatas, exclaimed: ‘Schubert, I almost admire your playing even more than your compositions!’” If Schubert’s impromptus, moments musicaux, ländler, and other short piano pieces distill the essence of his lyrical genius in its purest and most concentrated form, his mature piano sonatas, fantasies, and other works combine the intimacy of the salon with an almost symphonic breadth.
Schubert’s contribution to the four-hand piano literature was integral to his artistic vision. The lightweight songs, marches, and polonaises of the 1810s and early 1820s—a number of which were inspired by his pupils Marie and Caroline Esterházy, of the aristocratic Hungarian clan—prefigure the monumental variations, romances, and fugues he wrote at the end of his short life, culminating in the great F-Minor Fantasie. Completed in April 1828, the Fantasie is dedicated to Countess Caroline, for whom the composer nurtured an unrequited love. The music’s bittersweet beauty and emotional volatility arguably lend themselves to the autobiographical interpretation that Beethoven’s biographer Anton Schindler read into the score: “He who wishes to open the book of his own life will surely find a page there depicting a situation to which Schubert, in this Fantasie, has created the music. The sweetest and yet most melancholy feelings of bygone days, with all their struggles of passions and reason, will spring to the mind of the sensitive and thinking listener and pass before the mirror of his soul like beloved shadows.”
The Fantasie comprises four interconnected sections of sharply different characters. The first is built around a wistful F-minor melody characterized by an insistent dotted figure and stuttering grace notes. Seamlessly modulating upward a half-step, Schubert abruptly shifts gears in the F-sharp–minor Largo, with its melodramatic trills and jagged rhythms, before throwing us off-balance again with a fleet, triple-time scherzo that flickers between minor and major modes. The original theme returns at the beginning of the “finale,” only to give way to a brisk fugue based on another tune we’ve heard earlier.
—Harry Haskell