Classical music can be cheeky, too

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) 
Divertimento (1931) 

“It was like a drawing room in which someone has suddenly made a bad smell. Everyone pretended not to notice …” 

That’s impresario Sergei Diaghilev on the 1928 premiere of Stravinsky’s Le baiser de la fée (The Fairy’s Kiss), dishing it out with an extra helping of sour grapes. For more than fifteen years his Ballets Russes had dominated the French dance scene, but now he had a rival in the Ballets Ida Rubinstein. He wasn’t coping well. Rubinstein had siphoned off several of Diaghilev’s most celebrated collaborators, choreographer Bronislava Nijinska and scenic designer Alexandre Benois. Worst of all was his “first son,” composer Igor Stravinsky, who “has given himself up entirely to the love of God and cash.”

Ida Rubinstein was a Ballets Russes alumna who had found her métier as an arts patron; her commissions included Debussy’s Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien and Ravel’s Boléro in addition to Stravinsky’s Le baiser de la fée. Never a particularly thriving enterprise, the Ballets Ida Rubinstein closed for good in 1935 after only a few on-again-off-again seasons. 

For his Rubinstein commission, Stravinsky chose the music of Tchaikovsky as the basis for Le baiser de la fée, much as he had selected compositions by late Baroque Neapolitan composers such as Giovanni Battista Pergolesi for his 1920 Diaghilev ballet Pulcinella. This was to be no mere pastiche, but a re-imagining of relatively unfamiliar Tchaikovsky piano pieces and lieder, interwoven with original material, the whole provided with a delicate orchestration that focused on cozy instrumental groupings and rarely employed the full ensemble. The end result has enjoyed only a fitful presence on the ballet stage, but Stravinsky’s suite drawn from his composite score has lived on solidly as the four-movement Divertimento. 

The Divertimento follows the plot (such as it is) of Le baiser de la fée, inasmuch as the first three movements correspond to the first three scenes of the ballet, but the fourth movement is wholly given over to the pas de deux from the third scene, ending in a Keystone Kops-style galop filled with high spirits and comedic gestures. 

Jacques Ibert (1890–1962) 
Flute Concerto (1934) 

Ibert’s dazzling Flute Concerto can claim a trio of godfathers, all leading figures in the history of French flute playing: grand master Paul Taffanel taught both Marcel Moyse, who commissioned the concerto, and Philippe Gaubert, who conducted the premiere. That’s quite a heritage. Fortunately, Ibert was up to the task of fashioning a concerto worthy of its distinguished lineage. 

A pianist, violinist, and composer, Ibert was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire at age 20 and won the coveted Prix de Rome on his first attempt, at age 29. He flourished in the artistic hothouse that was Paris in the 1920s, right along such worthies as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, Ernest Hemingway, and Jean Cocteau. He kept his eyes and ears open, assimilated what he liked and ignored what he didn’t. 

Ibert performed a tightrope act between two opposing pillars of 20th century modernism. Not for him the gleaming washes of French Impressionism or the contorted introversion of German Expressionism. “I want to be free,” he exclaimed, “independent of the prejudices which arbitrarily divide the defenders of a certain tradition, and the partisans of a certain avant garde.” He insisted on writing music that he wanted to listen to himself. That generally didn’t sit well with the commentarial classes, whose ingrained snobberies dictated that Ibert would be typecast as a peripheral figure who might write enjoyable enough music but who didn’t really matter in the greater scheme of things. (Exactly why critics tend to praise composers who write stuff that nobody likes, but diss those who achieve popular success, will ever remain one of the inscrutabilities of their odd profession.) 

Ibert aimed high with the Flute Concerto and scored a bull’s-eye with one of the most challenging and popular works ever written for the instrument. The Allegro first movement weaves a glistening tapestry with the solo flute often paired with other wind instruments such as bassoon and clarinet. The gemlike Andante floats both solo flute and violin in a wistful, melancholic idyll that savors ever so subtly of jazz, or even the blues. It’s in the third movement, Allegro scherzando, that the jazz elements really come into their own. There’s a Looney Tunes vibe in the way that it flits, floats, and flutters, all with a carefree insouciance that belies its technical difficulty. A pensive central episode provides contrast before the headlong sprint resumes, leading to a final, sassy flounce. 

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) 
Symphony No. 1 in F Minor, Op. 10 (1924–25) 

The eminent composer-teacher Alexander Glazunov deserves a heartfelt round of huzzahs for his championship of the young Dmitri Shostakovich. Having seen that his teenaged student was at risk of malnutrition from the severe food rationing imposed in the years immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution, Glazunov used his influence to get his protégé’s rations increased. Better yet, Glazunov recognized the startling brilliance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 1 in F Minor, Op. 10, written when he was all of 18 years old and still a student at the Leningrad Conservatory. Not that Glazunov was really up to following Shostakovich’s quirky style and bounding leaps of imagination. “I don’t understand anything. Of course the work shows great talent, but I don’t understand it,” he said. But he knew a good thing when he saw it. 

Glazunov arranged for the new symphony’s premiere, but fortunately for everybody concerned refrained from conducting it himself. He has been in posterity’s doghouse ever since he mangled the premiere of Rachmaninoff’s first symphony and sent its young author into a tailspin of depression. That responsibility went to Nikolai Malko, music director of the Leningrad Philharmonic, who was fascinated by Shostakovich’s kaleidoscopic sonic landscape. “It was immediately clear that this  . . . was the vibrant, original, and striking work of a composer with an original approach,” he reported. 

Malko conducted the premiere on May 12, 1926 to a sold-out house. It blew everybody’s socks off. “The audience was thrilled, and there was a certain festive mood in the hall,” Malko wrote. Happily for all of us, radio had entered the picture by 1926 and the premiere was broadcast. The symphony quickly caught the attention of such critical European conductors as Bruno Walter, Arturo Toscanini, Otto Klemperer, and Leopold Stokowski. Thanks to their efforts, the Shostakovich First became an international phenomenon and kicked off a sequence of 15 symphonies that rank amongst the towering musical achievements of the 20th century. 

And yet it’s the work of a teenager. Shostakovich wasn’t your everyday 18 year old, to be sure, and not only because of his immense musical gifts. His childhood had been dominated by the revolutions that swept away Romanov rule and established a Communist regime. Life was tough for everybody in those grim years of civil war and famine, and Leningrad Conservatory students received no special dispensations. Shostakovich might have starved without Glazunov’s assistance. Family support was meager, especially after his father died from pneumonia. He earned a pittance as the piano player in silent movie theaters. He hated it. 

He was a sponge. Anything and everything that came his way went into his voracious musical intellect, there to be absorbed, interpreted, manipulated, transformed, and recombined. He got to know the latest trends, jazz and musical theater and the wild stuff coming out of Weimar Germany. He soaked up Stravinsky and Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky and Mahler. Having taken it all in, he funneled it through the nervous intensity and kooky sense of humor that remained fundamental characteristics of his style thereafter. Shostakovich sounded like Shostakovich from the very beginning, and nowhere more so than in the First Symphony. 

It is not a perfect composition. The influences aren’t always fully integrated and the fourth movement doesn’t quite jell. But no matter. Its appeal is immediate and irresistible. Pussy-footing woodwinds and solo trumpet start it all off with a sense of merry skullduggery, followed by a deliberately silly march for the primary theme with a high-speed waltz for the secondary theme. The sense of the absurd continues in the second movement, a madcap scherzo with a punchy solo piano part, the fracas interrupted by a somber contrasting interlude. 

The third movement makes wonderful use of the solo oboe and cello in a sustained lament that anticipates the devastating slow movements still to come. A snare drum leads directly into the finale, which combines dazzling virtuosity with gloomy portents of doom. The symphony ends in a blaze of grandiose fanfares that can be heard as either heroic or tragic – a preview of the enigmatic ending of the Fifth Symphony, written 11 years later by a composer who had been deeply scarred in the purgatory of Stalin’s disapproval. After 1937, a work like the First Symphony would be unthinkable, its unfettered freedom an increasingly distant memory in an ever-constricting Soviet enclosure.