Word: musicically
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Rimsky thus was not in the concert hall to hear the first performance of his protégé's Fireworks. But another man was, whose presence helped change the whole course of 20th Century music...
...arts. Vain and hot-tempered but a man of impeccable taste, he decided that if he couldn't be a great artist himself he could encourage and sponsor men who were. In Paris he put on a giant show of Russian art, a series of concerts of Russian music, and the first Parisian performance of Musorgsky's great opera Boris Godunov, with Chaliapin in the title role. Then he was ready for his biggest project: Russian ballet...
Stravinsky says that he "willed The Rite of Spring to be romantic" and that he has willed just about everything since to be severe and dry, a kind of music he regards as "more mature." In the years since The Rite, Stravinsky has turned out some 60 works, including The Wedding which is virtually a textbook today in some music classes; a remarkable oratorio, Oedipus Rex; The Soldier's Tale, Symphonies for Wind Instruments, Symphony in Three Movements, a Violin Concerto. All are as precisely and beautifully made as a fine watch-and, say his critics, most are about...
...gave 20th Century music its biggest shock seemed to have abruptly turned his back on his times, and gone back beyond Bach. "It was wrong to consider me a revolutionary," he says. "All I did was a few inventions...
Though Stravinsky went Bachwards, it is doubtful whether Johann Sebastian would recognize, or relish, the result. For Stravinsky does not write antiquarian music : he ruffles the calm of his counterpoint with eruptive rhythm and dissonance. It was not the kind of music to excite the Stravinsky cult that had cheered Petrouchka and The Rite of Spring; and it became fashionable in the '20s to say that the fire in the Stravinsky furnace burned out before World War I. It is not so fashionable to say that now: in recent years even some hostile critics concede that Stravinsky...