Stravinsky would sometimes use the word ‘symphony’ in the Ancient Greek sense, meaning simply ‘sounding together’, rather than a traditional developing form. The Symphonies of Wind Instruments is the most extreme example of this, akin to a compositional treatise on how to layer the orchestral woodwind and brass in striking and colourful ways. It is constructed from highly contrasted blocks of sound, which are often quite static and austere in effect.
Stravinsky wrote Symphonies a few years after The Rite of Spring, and concurrently with his initial attempts to complete Les noces, for which he struggled to decide on an instrumentation (he eventually settled on a solution with no wind instruments, and in fact no sustaining instruments at all – the complete inverse of Symphonies).
Like those two great ballets, Symphonies is interlaced with folk tunes (or rather authentic-sounding forgeries that Stravinsky wrote himself). These mimic the playful stress patterns of Russian speech, and create unpredictable rhythms and changes in metre. While this technique conjures up chaos and brutality in The Rite and a wild celebratory atmosphere in Les noces, here these melodies are melancholic and eerie, meandering between the denser textures.
Symphonies ends with a reworking of Stravinsky’s recent piano piece in memory of Debussy, who had died in 1918, giving this otherwise abstract piece an elegiac profundity and, perhaps more importantly for Stravinsky, the sense of a ritual or, better still, a rite.
Programme note © Tom Owen
