Word: petrouchka
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Polka for Jumbo. Yet all his life Igor Stravinsky has written music, sometimes great music, to order-for people who would hire him on his terms. The Firebird, Petrouchka and The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky's best ballet scores, were commissioned. He has composed a polka for elephants for the Ringling Brothers, a Scherzo á la Russe for Paul Whiteman, Ballet Scenes for Billy Rose, an Ebony Concerto for Woody Herman and his jazzband. Scherzo á la Russe was written to fit one side of a Whiteman record (says Stravinsky: "He played it very badly. He has a very...
Bebop to Ballet. At 66, Igor Feodorovich Stravinsky, if not the greatest living composer, is certainly the most influential. Since the violent rhythms, brutal harmonies and splashing tone colors of Firebird, Petrouchka and Rite of Spring first exploded on an astonished-and unprepared -world 35 years ago, Stravinsky has been imitated, consciously or unconsciously, by composers from bebop to ballet, from Russia to the redwoods...
Dissonance & Debt. In Firebird, Stravinsky had hinted at strange rhythmic innovations-accents that lurched and stuttered. In Petrouchka, he had chords embracing chords that were not even kissing cousins. In Rite of Spring, he had gone a greater distance in dissonance, and pounded the sounds home with all the drums the pit could hold...
...most familiar complaint of modern composers is that they don't get a hearing. On that score, Igor Stravinsky has little to complain of. In the past month, packed houses in Manhattan had heard everything from his popular Petrouchka (1911) to his dusty-dry Symphony in C (1940). Even his opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex had been uncovered for the first time in 17 years. Bobbing, crouching and flapping his arms like a grotesque little bird, Composer Stravinsky had conducted several performances of his music himself...
...first seen Ernest Ansermet (rhymes with ah sir may) and his black, square-cut beard 32 years ago, conducting while Nijinsky danced. It was Ansermet who gave the U.S. its first taste of Stravinsky's tart Petrouchka and Debussy's heady L'Après-Midi d'un Faune...