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New book by Robert Craft reminds us of Igor Stravinsky's Toronto connections, including Glenn Gould

By John Terauds on May 29, 2013

stravinsky

Someone should have declared today’s 100th anniversary of The Rite of Spring‘s premiere as Igor Stravinsky Day. It’s the perfect excuse for a quick peek into the composer’s Toronto connections (which included Glenn Gould) through a new book by retired conductor and Stravinsky assistant, Robert Craft.

Craft, who will turn 90 this fall, has written extensively on the nearly three decades he spent with Stravinsky, up to the composer’s death at age 89 in 1971. His latest collection of reminiscences, just published by Naxos Books, is Stravinsky: Discoveries and Memories.

discoveriesThe hardcover book comes with a bonus CD of today’s soundtrack: The Rite of Spring, performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra with Craft on the podium (it’s a slightly dry Abbey Road Studios recording from 1995, available together with the one-act opera The Nightingale on Naxos album No. 8-557501).

(The e-book release comes with the option of images and audio samples.)

The great beauty of Craft’s work is his simple prose, reduced to the essence of conveying each anecdote. It’s a word quilt, where the chapters don’t necessarily have to be read in sequence. Craft’s Preface reminds us of his connection with the composer.

The native of New York State fell in love with Stravinsky’s music as a teenager, then arrived at Juilliard in 1941, where 20th century music was frowned upon. So he formed his own student ensembles to present Stravinsky’s work. Craft wrote the composer to ask for a copy of a score he couldn’t find in New York City, setting off a chain of events that, in the end, had Craft at the composer’s side as all-purpose aide and rehearsal conductor for the rest of his life.

I remember being impressed with the number of photographs of Stravinsky in Toronto spilling out from a bulging cardboard sleeve in the Toronto Star’s library. They had been taken while the composer conducted multiple concerts and made several recordings in the city between 1962 and 1967.

“The city’s orchestras, choruses, directors, audiences and critics received him with more cordiality and intelligent appreciation than those in any other city this side of the Atlantic, with the possible exception of Boston during Koussevitzky’s reign,” writes Craft.

The memoir states that Glenn Gould was key to establishing the Toronto connection. Gould was an admirer of Craft’s and had in 1961 asked for him to guest conduct the CBC Symphony Orchestra, which was based in this city.

“I reported to Stravinsky on the high calibre of the CBC musicians, which led to a concert in Toronto honouring the composer’s eightieth birthday [in 1962],” Craft recalls.

He also mentions the irony that Stravinsky was fascinated by Gould — but that Gould had no time for Stravinsky’s compositions.

Stravinsky had first heard Gould at a Los Angeles concert in the late 1950s, and was finally introduced to the pianist by Leonard Bernstein in 1960. Craft continues:

Two years later, in January 1962, after our arrival from Los Angeles in a blizzard in the middle of the night, Stravinsky and Gould somehow managed to breakfast together in our Toronto hotel. During the following week Gould came to my rehearsals in Massey Hall, sitting with Stravinsky while I worked with the orchestra. The subjects of their conversations were remote from the new-music scene, the pianist soliciting the composer’s opinions on such unlikely topics as the chamber music of Max Reger, heard in the St Petersburg of Stravinsky’s youth.

Another Toronto connection made was with John Roberts, at the time head of the Canadian Music Centre, who was asked to be Stravinsky’s local escort. Roberts has been key to establishing and maintaining Gould’s legacy.

When we say it’s a small world, this is what we mean — and Craft manages to poke his finger at dozens and dozens of little connections like these — ones which may not always make it into official biographies.

Given my pride in the quality of musicianship in Toronto, it’s nice not only to be proven right. It’s also nice to be reminded in a city overflowing with people who envy New York and London and even Chicago that this is and was no provincial backwater, even back in the days when Eaton’s modestly draped its store windows closed on Sundays, so as to not tempt passersby with worldly goods.

There’s a lot more fine reading in Craft’s memoir, much of it far more pertinent from a musical history point of view.

For example, I appreciated being reminded that Stravinsky would have experienced a lot of what we currently know about Early Music in the form of new research published during his adulthood. A new scholarly edition of the Odhecaton, the first printed book of polyphonic music, dating from 1501, didn’t come out until 1942 — and it was Nadia Boulanger who presented a copy of the book to Stravinsky.

Stravinsky’s later scores are filled with references to Early Music, and he apparently had a huge personal collection of old English music. Craft, who had been working with a colleague on transcribing the strange and wonderful works of Carlo Gesualdo into modern notation, introduced the composer to it in 1952.

Stravinsky, ehnthralled, set to working on missing musical fragments — a task that led to his own arrangements of three madrigals for modern orchestra: Monumentum pro Gesualdo di Venosa ad CD annum.

A half-century after the riotous first night of The Rite of Spring, a night when composer and choreographer were both enfants terribles clearly enjoying the outrage, here came delicate renderings of 400-year-old music. We also have to remember that 1960 was a time when the new music world was in the iron clutch of atonalism.

The older Stravinsky’s world was upside down — the new was old and the old was new.

It happens to be the 500th anniversary of the birth of Gesualdo this year. And, in another little parallel, Monumentum pro Gesualdo was also the basis of a ballet, choreographed by Georges Balanchine.

So here, in a topsy-turvy sort of spirit, here is Stravinsky’s Monumentum pro Gesualdo, recorded by the Columbia Symphony Orchestra in 1960, with the composer conducting:

You can find all the details on Craft’s book here.

If you feel like exploring The Rite of Spring itself, there are countless places to go today. I recommend starting with a virtual stroll through a great post on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s music site here.

John Terauds

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