Stravinsky Mavra

Day 39

Stravinsky Mavra 

Soloists

CBC Symphony Orchestra

Igor Stravinsky

Stravinsky has been part of my musical life for as long as I can remember. Indeed on his death I wrote an in memoriam funeral march in his honour - thankfully it remains locked away never to be seen again!. Over the years I have played many of the major Stravinsky works and I've never found one which I didn't think was anything other than a masterpiece. Indeed even the scraps from his workbench - such as the little orchestral suites - are full of interest.

I didn't think that Stravinsky was going to be part of this project because I didn't think that there was anything of his that I hadn't heard, but going through the CD shelves I came across Mavra, which I think must previously have passed me by.  

I was really pleased to make its acquaintance. It is a miniature comic opera with a silly story about a girl who smuggles in her lover disguised as a woman to take the place  of her recently deceased maidservant. It is a very witty piece with all of the touches that one has come to expect from the composer. It didn't do well at its first performance  at the Paris Opéra, probably because it is an intimate piece and got lost on the vast stage there. Stravinsky remained very fond of the score and considered it one of his best works.

It is very much a transition piece coming at the end of the composer's early Russian period and his middle period neo-classical works. Indeed Richard Taruskin's monumental work Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions is subtitled A biography of the works through Mavra. The music is still very much in the tradition of Les Noces but does also have elements of the Neo-classical works which are to follow.  The scoring is unusual -  a full wind and brass section with full strength cellos and basses but with only two solo violins and a solo viola. Indeed those last three had so little do that I did sometimes wonder whether the composer had forgotten at times that he had included them. That sound of wind and lower strings is so redolent of the Symphony of Psalms that was to come a few years later - I'm sure that Stravinsky's experiments here with this sonority remained in his memory as he came to write the later work.