Stravinsky, Bernstein & Ravel: Oct 9-11, 2026
What a great program of music that dances AND throws shade. 🤓 Ravel and Stravinsky admired and supported each other even when they had mince-y words to say. Bernstein was heavily inspired by both of them. Enjoy this silly meme AND exploring their works!
Igor Stravinsky
Divertimento, The Fairy's Kiss
DIVE IN!
"My music is best understood by children and animals" - Igor Stravinsky
"His music is pseudo Bach-ism!" - Maurice Ravel re Stravinsky's neoclassicism
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) was a Russian born composer, conductor, and pianist who immigrated to France in 1934 and then to the United States in 1945. He was very well established as a leading composer of the Modernist style growing out of the end of the 19th century and into the early 20th century, and continues to be one of the most highly regarded, influential, and most performed composers of the 20th century. This is true largely due to his fresh way of considering sounds, his use of tight punctuated rhythms, and his inventive new harmonies. He gained relatively early fame from the trio of large scale ballets he composed for Ballet Russes: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913).
Like Beethoven, Stravinsky's compositional career is often divided into three main periods. The first of these is his Russian period (1913–1920), during which time he was drawing frequently from Russian styles and folklore, most iconically for his ballet tryptic of The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring.
Stravinsky’s neoclassical period followed the Russian period and lasted roughly from 1920 to 1950. This expressive style had Stravinsky experimenting with the use of compositional techniques from the Classical era of the 1700s and drawing themes from even earlier eras to incorporate into a modern reframing. It’s during this period that he created The Fairy’s Kiss.
About the Music:
Stravinsky composed The Fairy's Kiss in 1928 for Ballet Russes as a ballet in one act with four scenes. He revised it in 1950 for George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet.
Stravinsky was known, with both respect and frustration, to be a stylistic chameleon. Even within his three primary stylistic eras he was always trying new things and shifting his choices for musical expression as a result. The Fairy’s Kiss is an example of his neoclassicism but incorporates melodies from some of Romantic era fellow Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
The narrative is based on a short story by Hans Christian Andersen called The Ice Maiden. Stravinsky included and further developed Tchaikovsky’s melodies as a way of paying homage and marking the 35 year anniversary of his death.
The Divertimento from. The Fairy’s Kiss is a concert suite which Stravinsky arranged in 1934 and revised in 1949. It has four movements:
Sinfonia
Danses suisses
Scherzo (Au moulin)
Pas de deux: Adagio, Variation, Coda
The second movement, Danses suisses, is where the most obvious use of Tchaikovsky’s melodies exists. In one example right near the beginning he breaks up the melody into small chunklets played by the principal strings and pits this against interjections from the brass. This gives a sort of concerto grosso effect of contrasting a small ensemble vs a larger one while also contrasting an older style with a newer one. It’s very effective and definitely a point of interest.
A fun moment from that same movement comes in a sweet waltz section that seems to go completely off the rails. Pay attention to the tuba who first plays in the expected places OOM pah pah but later with the trombones seems to shove this waltz into a 4 beat pattern OOM pah pah pah while the woodwinds attempt to stay in 3. This is a sneaky way of setting us up for the Ravel waltzes that come on the second half of the program!
A typical performance of The Fairy’s Kiss Divertimento lasts about 22 minutes.
Resources:
Leonard Bernstein
Serenade, After Plato's Symposium
About the composer:
Leonard Bernstein (1918 – 1990) was an American conductor, composer, pianist, music educator, author, and humanitarian. He was the first American-born conductor to receive international acclaim. Bernstein was a little like Stravinsky - unsatisfied to express himself in just one style. He composed music for the symphony, ballet, film, theatre, choral works, opera, chamber music, and more. Outside of concert music and ballet he is best known for his musical theater piece West Side Story and the film score to On the Waterfront. His best known concert works include his 1971 Mass, Chichester Psalms from 1965, and the piece on this program - Serenade after Plato’s Symposium.
Important side note for this weekend with National Coming Out Day on Sunday - Leonard Bernstein was a tireless civil rights advocate, protesting the Vietnam War, supporting nuclear disarmament, raising awareness and funding for HIV/AIDS research, and generally engaging in international initiatives for human rights and world peace.
About the music:
Bernstein composed "Serenade, after Plato’s Symposium" in 1954. It is essentially a concerto for violin and a small orchestra of strings, harp, and percussion.
Serenade is a 5 movement work inspired by Plato’s Symposium which is a series of dialogues based on various statements in support of aspects of love, with each statement made by a different distinguished speaker. It's like a dream scenario conversation from Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party but with guys in robes instead. That’s right. You heard me.
Each of the five movements is named for one or two of the seven speakers as inspiration for the music :
Phaedrus: Pausanias – marked Lento (slow) and Allegro (lively) - Phaedrus begins by claiming that Eros (Love) is one of the oldest gods and is the greatest source of human virtue and happiness. Pausanias responds there is not just one Love, but two, corresponding to two different manifestations of the goddess Aphrodite - the common Aphrodite in which love is vulgar, fleeting, and seeks physical gratification versus the heavenly Aphrodite which is more a mentor role focusing on the cultivation of the mind, character, and virtue rather than physical gratification.
Aristophanes – marked Allegretto (light and moving) - Aristophanes gives the famous Origin of Love speech in which love is the deep, innate human urge to find and reunite with our original lost "other half".
Eryximachus, the doctor – marked Presto (very fast) - Eryximachus contends that Love pervades all of nature, including animals, plants, weather, astronomy, and music. He offers that it's a harmonizing principle which brings together opposing elements in the physical universe such as hot and cold, wet and dry, or bitter and sweet
Agathon – marked Adagio (slow) Agathon attributes the four cardinal virtues to Love: Justice - Serving and ruling through voluntary agreement rather than force; Temperance - Mastering all pleasures and desires; Courage - Surpassing even Ares, the god of war, who is captive to Love; and Wisdom: Exhibiting poetic and creative inspiration (making poets of others).
Socrates: Alcibiades – marked Molto tenuto (very held) and Allegro molto vivace (Lively, very fast) - Socrates asserts that Love is the child of Plenty and Poverty. Because of this, Love is always needy, but resourceful and scheming after the beautiful and good. Alcibiades bursts into the banquet late and very drunk, and delivers a passionate speech praising Socrates rather than Eros/Love.
In each of these movements, the music depicts elements of the core principles of each philosopher's offering. The music for Alcibiades is quite jazzy and careens wildly through the orchestra, offering fun auditory imagery to end the piece.
A typical performance lasts just 30 of the shortest minutes of your life since this is objectively the best violin concerto ever. So say I. At least until someone writes the Judy Chicago Dinner Party one.
Resources:
Maurice Ravel
Noble & Sentimental Waltzes
La Valse
"Ravel is a musical Swiss watchmaker!" - Igor Stravinsky
About the composer:
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) was a French composer of the same Modernist era as Igor Stravinsky. A slow and painstaking worker, Ravel composed fewer pieces than many of his contemporaries. Stravinsky noted this when he quipped that Ravel was a “great Swiss clockmaker”. He is most commonly associated with the stylistic term Impressionism although he rejected that description. Ravel was famously regarded as France’s greatest living composer in the 1920s and 1930s. He found his own way as a composer, developing a style that emphasized clarity and incorporated elements of modernism, neoclassicism, and jazz. His best known works include Bolero, and his arrangement of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.
Maurice Ravel composed music until the final few years of his life when he began suffering from neurological difficulties similar to aphasia which were at various times suggested to be frontotemporal dementia, Alzheimer's disease, or Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease among other possibilities. He died following a surgery that only briefly alleviated some of the symptoms. There’s a great episode of the podcast RadioLab which covers the story of Ravel’s decline, called Unravelling Bolero. Highly recommend.
Maurice Ravel is perhaps best known for his exceptional orchestration. His compositions never fail to capture the imagination of the listener as we are whisked away to a soundscape that routinely includes a large and vibrant palette of tone colors.
About the music:
Ravel composed Noble and Sentimental Waltzes in 1911 for solo piano. He published the orchestra version in 1912. The title reflects a stated homage to Franz Schubert’s collection of waltzes in two sets: Noble Waltzes and Sentimental Waltzes. In Ravel’s own words "The title sufficiently indicates my intention to compose a succession of waltzes, after Schubert's example." Hot take - that title is pretty much where the comparison ends!
A typical performance of all eight Noble and Sentimental waltzes takes about 15 minutes.
Ravel began a small obsession with waltz in the early 1900s. As early as 1906 he was working on ideas that would become La valse (The Waltz), poème chorégraphique pour orchestre (a choreographic poem for orchestra). He spent the majority of his effort on this work in 1919 and 1920 intending for it to be a ballet. If you listen carefully you can hear quotes from what became La Valse present in the 1911 Noble and Sentimental Waltzes.
The Colorado Symphony performances of these waltzes are presented as a complete set with La Valse finishing. This is due to a George Balanchine choreography and with NYC Ballet Music Director Andrew Litton on the podium it makes sense to present them this way.
In La Valse, a wild combination of several reworked traditional Viennese waltzes, Ravel takes full advantage of his skill for layering sounds to create a new take on this venerated form.
Ravel left this note at the beginning of his manuscript to set the scene: "Through whirling clouds, waltzing couples may be faintly distinguished. The clouds gradually scatter: one sees an immense hall peopled with a whirling crowd. The scene is gradually illuminated. The light of the chandeliers bursts forth. Set in an imperial court, about 1855."
La Valse is definitely a grand scale waltz but it only ever hints at what we've come to understand and expect from a lively, or delicate, or flowing social dance practiced in high society spaces with controlled specified movements and a sense of monied class. Instead it sounds very much like the birth, evolution, and wild death spiral life story of the waltz. A bit like Rose and Jack's disorienting closeup spinning dance scene in Titanic before everything goes to holy heck.
The first sounds we hear are the primordial goo of waltz DNA being formed. Usually waltzes establish a clear 3 beat pattern right away, with strong emphasis on beat 1 and lesser/least emphasis on beats 2 and 3 respectively. Instead, we get a low indistinct rumbling with a sharp beat 3 and a weak beat 1. It seems like the music is trying to decide what shape to take.
Soon thereafter it becomes clear this is indeed a waltz, but with the introduction of each new melody we also feel time ebbing and flowing in a way that doesn't always make sense if we're trying to find our dance steps. Is it hesitant, a little tipsy, hiding and planning an ambush? Hard to know! Meanwhile the colors of the instruments in the orchestra are so beguiling that we're led down a path of wonderment until it's too late to turn back.
The second half showcases all of the melodies we've already heard but this time they're fragmented, stretched, presented in surprisingly different instruments. The orchestra begins to sound desperate and wild. This is about the time listeners realize they're getting cooked like lobsters in a pot. Feels good in that nice warm water until it's roiling and there's no escape! The final nail in the coffin is the fact that the final notes we hear are in a 2 or 4 pattern and not the 1,2,3 waltz. We dead. We gone.
A typical performance of La Valse lasts about 12 minutes.
resources:
Get Nerdy!
In La Valse, Ravel is poking fun at tradition. He uses material from Viennese waltzes to compose this piece. Ravel distorts these tunes in many creative ways until some of them are hardly recognizable! Gather your nerd posse and choose a favorite well known tune that you all know well. Sing it together once in its traditional way. Now facilitate a brainstorming session for creative ways to alter or distort this tune without completely changing it. The tune should be at least somewhat recognizable as a shell of its former self, but don’t be afraid to go a little overboard! [for example: suddenly change to a very fast or slow tempo, make random silences at key moments, replace words with odd percussion noises, insert a fragment of a different song, repeat a fragment of material several times, etc.] Choose a few of these and map out the result on the dry erase board you know you have because you are a proud nerd. 🤓😎 Try singing it together. This may take a couple of tries, but will be well worth the effort! How different is it from the original? Is it still possible to hear where your new creation got its start? How did it feel to perform the new version versus the older one?
Now listen to the last three minutes of La Valse. Ravel has already done some pretty creative things to alter his chosen waltz tunes, but the ending definitely takes the cake! Catalogue as many changes as you can. Listen a second or third time if possible. What did you notice that Ravel did to distort or alter the traditional waltz music? [ex. getting faster until it's ridiculous, sudden dynamics and tempo changes, repeated series of quick crescendi, added “memory” of a traditional waltz in the middle of everything, repeated tiny fragments in a frenzied way, etc.] Did you and Ravel make any of the same choices? How did it feel to engage in a creative process that mirrors Ravel’s?
Comments