SCALING STRAVINSKY
Duo pianists lend hands as Vancouver Bach Choir rises to the challenge of Les Noces.
Vancouver was the scene 60 years ago of an important Canadian premiere. In early April 1952, a group of students and faculty ( plus, doubtless, a ringer or two) gave our first mounting of Igor Stravinsky’s Les Noces, a work for voices, pianos and percussion.
Now the Vancouver Bach Choir on Saturday takes on the work, arguably the most important choral composition of the last century.
It would be edifying to say how a work once considered radical to the point of un- performability has become a standard repertoire item. Mounting Les Noces ( The Wedding) is still a daunting undertaking.
The hub- bub over Stravinsky’s 1913 ballet The Rite of Spring quickly became the stuff of music history legend. Les Noces ( 1923), with its brazen celebration of percussion, hasn’t gone down in the history books the same way, but it’s just as important.
But it’s a tricky thing to deal with. First, there are parts for four pianos. Add a raft of percussion instruments, soloists, and choir, and you have just part of the picture. Then there’s the music, the apotheosis of rhythm, and hard to count. And it’s in Russian: plenty of unfamiliar words to be spit out in complicated rhythmic counterpoint that demands absolute accuracy.
“Why bother?” has been the tacit response of many a choral conductor. That’s not the position of the VBC’S Leslie Dala. Dala has the help of two old hands at Les Noces, duo pianists Marcel and Elizabeth Bergmann. They’ve done the work live in performances in Edmonton and Calgary, and were involved in the “definitive” recording of the work for Naxos.
“We recorded it in Abbey Road with Robert Craft, but with a smaller chamber choir, 30 voices or so,” says Dala.
Although there have been other versions of the score, Craft’s insider status as part of the Stravinsky household gave him unique authority to get the work right once and for all.
“Craft pointed out how unhappy Stravinsky was with the English translation. Stravinsky did make some changes — or at least Craft said they were his changes — in some dynamic markings,” says Elizabeth Bergmann.
“It’s a difficult piece with enormous demands on everyone involved; no one has an easy time. As is typical with Stravinsky, there is never a moment when anyone can relax. The metre is always changing. It’s amazing music, but there’s lots of jumping around on the piano, lots of octaves. It all sounds quite easy but it’s quite acrobatic.”
After all that intensity and brilliance, the 24- minute work is suddenly over in a coda of astonishing originality and beauty, a ritual of simple notes and tolling bells.
While the Stravinsky masterpiece is the program’s raison d’être, it’s not enough for a whole program. Dala will be filling the program with another major work, Catulli Carmina by Carl Orff, a sort- of sequel to Orff’s wildly popular Carmina Burana and the 2008 Midsummer Flower, a short concert- starter by Marcel Bergmann.
One could call the Orff “Les Noces- Lite.”
Orff was clever and learned a great deal from Stravinsky,” says Bergmann. “He even includes direct quotes from Symphony of Psalms. Catulli Carmina is a lot less done than Carmina Burana.”
Bergmann’s piece was created for a concert including Catulli Carmina. “Midsummer Flower was for the exact same setup. It’s about eight minutes, and is based on a Renaissance poem by John Skelton; they wanted something about love and spring which would be thematically compatible.
“One of my students found the poem for me. To Mistress Margaret Hussey was written for the poet’s mistress, praise of a beautiful lady, and it uses different metres, very free style, so I built the corresponding musical sections around the parts of the poem.”