Word: soulima
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, the wiry, sandy-haired little conductor who took the podium for the second ballet looked vaguely familiar. When he began to conduct, it was with some of the flapping firebird motions of Igor Stravinsky. But it was not Igor. It was his son, Soulima Stravinsky (TIME, July 26, 1948), who was making his U.S. debut as a conductor and composer...
...Soulima did not have much to work with. He had pieced together a score from his favorite Scarlatti sonatas for a revised version of Choreographer Antonia Cobos' middling success of 1944 and 1946, The Mute Wife. Even with Soulima's new-music, the new version was just middling. He had had less than two hours to rehearse the ballet orchestra, a part pickup outfit seldom two rungs better than a good firemen's band. And about the most charitable word the critics could find for the Ballet Russe's ragged performances was "drab...
...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...
...well qualified to teach; he learned his own technique from one of the best: the great French pedagogue Isidor Philipp. He also picked up a few hints from his dad. Stravinsky once heard Soulima as a child playing Schumann's Etudes Symphoniques and stopped him: "Tell your teacher he will teach you my music and I will teach you Chopin and Schumann myself...
Born in Switzerland but brought up in France, Soulima remained behind and joined the French army when father Igor came to the U.S. in 1939. Soulima thinks the temporary separation was a good thing. Says he with a smile: "Now that I have begun to work out of my father's reflected glory, I want to stay...