Search - Stravinsky, Salonen, Stockholm Chamber :: Apollon Musagete / Cantata

An eye-opening Apollo, plus two tough fillers

Santa Fe Listener | Santa Fe, NM USA | 01/11/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The highlight here is an outstanding performance of Appllo (as Apollon musagete was renamed, I think when Stravinsky revised it in 1947). The composer took on the challenge of a "white ballet" -- one without a story -- of half-hour length, restricted to strings. He described the result, paradoxically, as "austere," "purely melodic," and deeply polyphonic. Conductors have been baffled how to style the music. Should it veer toward the lush, romantic side of the string serenade (a la Tchaikovsky and Dvorak) or the strict, chaste side of classical dance? Salonen strikes a perfect balance. It's easy to lose interest in Apollo's languid pace, but he gives us rich sonority, plush melody, and yet the intended restraint of an Apollonian aesthetic. I know I've made the music sound analytic and offputting -- it put me off for decades -- but what counts is Salonen's great success here.



The Concerto in D, which Stravinsky implied in a letter is his version of a Brandenburg Concerto, actually comes off as a bristly addendum to the Symphony in Three Movements. Only 12 min. long, it is much performed by small string orchestras. Salonen gives a suitably motorized reading, with clean lines and sharp articulation, but frankly, I am not inspired. This music ticks off its points unless a conductor finds a way for the tick-tock to mean something more.



Cantata, written in 1951 as Stravinsky entered his late phase, after the close of neoclassicism with The Rake's Progress, is hard to isten to and rarely performed. The composer was still interested in the difficulties of setting English texts, so he chose four anonymous poems from the 15th century and later (including the grim Lyke-Wake Dirge that Britten also employed, to more striking effect, in his Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings). The result, I think, is personal composition in the most cryptic sense. The listener is rarely invited in through charm, melody, contrast, or dramatic interest. Instead, we hear a small women's chorus, wind ensemble, and two vocal soloists (tenor and soprano) encased in a tightly disciplined range of expression. Cantata is one of Stravinsky's driest, most knotty works, and I take little pleasure from it. Salonen leads a committed reading, but it doesn't help that Sony's blurry engineering makes the English text incomprehensible without following the printed page.



In the end, I agree with the previous reviewers who find this one of Salonen's strongest Stravinsky recordings, but I thought it worthwhile to point out the thorny patches, too."