Word: petrouchka
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...brilliant, ten-year career of flawless grace and soaring leaps became romantic legend after he was pronounced incurably insane (dementia praecox) in-1919; of a kidney ailment; in London. Born and schooled in Russia, he set European balletomanes abuzz in 1911 when he danced Le Spectre de la Rose, Petrouchka, and L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune in Serge Diaghilev's new ballet company which opened in Paris. In 1916 he toured the Americas, where his fame mounted while his mental health declined (he began to identify himself with the faun in his most celebrated dance...
Soulima, 39 ("born between Firebird and Petrouchka"), lives with his wife Franchise and son Jean, 4, only a few bars and beats away from Igor in Hollywood. But he has not yet found much time to visit with the man he usually refers to as "my father," but sometimes as "Stravinsky." He has been too busy "living with Scarlatti" (he will record some sonatas for Allegro records this week) and preparing for his first U.S. piano concert tour. All summer, he taught piano six hours a day at the Music Academy of the West, in Santa Barbara...
Bearded Conductor Ansermet, who had introduced and championed much of the music of his friend Igor Stravinsky, seemed to agree on some of it with an early Stravinsky critic, Claude Debussy, who had said to Ansermet years ago: "You know how much I admire Petrouchka, but The Rite of Spring disturbs me. It seems to me that Stravinsky is trying to make music out of something that is not music, just like the Germans . . . tried to make breakfasts out of sawdust...
...most beautiful man"). To his detractors, he is a man "who can't even beat a waltz," a fellow who likes to chop up scores: one Washingtonian calls Kindler's National Symphony Orchestra "the only orchestra in the world to give a ten-minute performance of Petrouchka...
When asked which of his compositions he thinks will probably still be current a hundred years from now, he names Petrouchka, The Rite of Spring, The Soldier's Tale (1918) and Apollo Musagètes (1928). But he believes that his later works will also come into popularity. Early this year, after Manhattan concertgoers heard a kind of spontaneous retrospective show of the great composer's music (16 compositions in eleven concerts), few doubted him. Says Stravinsky: "I am not a kidder. I am not a tricky man. The music is there...