Sir Simon Rattle and the Berliner Philharmoniker have recorded Igor Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, Symphony in C and Symphony in Three Movements. The three works, all commissioned by American orchestras, were written over the course of about 15 years, during the composer’s ‘neoclassical’ period. The Symphonies were recorded in concert in September 2007 and are available in CD and digital download versions. Music lovers downloading the Symphonies from iTunes will receive Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920) as a bonus.
Track listing Igor Stravinsky
Symphony in 3 Movements
1) I
2) II
3) III
Symphony of Psalms
4) Part I – “Exacudi orationem meam” (Psalm 38, verses 13 & 14)
5) Part II – “Expectans expectavi Dominum” (Psalm 39, verses 2, 3 & 4)
6) Part III – “Alleluia, Laudate Dominum in sanctis Eius” (Psalm 150 complete)
Symphony in C
7) Moderato alla breve
8) Larghetto concertante
9) Allegretto
10) Largo – Temp guisto alla breve
Digital bonus track:
Symphonies of Winds
Berliner Philharmoniker
Simon Rattle
Rundfunkchor Berlin (Tracks 4-6), Chorus Master: Simon Halsey
In a recent interview, Rattle said that Stravinsky represented a “mixture of high intellect and deep, dark Russian passion. What’s clearer and clearer is how strong [his] Russian roots are and how much he tried to hide them.” Stravinsky “is the least known of all of the great composers, because we know … a very small part of his output [well]. If you know [only] the three great ballets, The Firebird, Petrushka, The Rite of Spring … you [know] only a tiny portion of his output. ... We’ve actually all had a lot of pleasure [preparing these performances] and a lot of people are realising [that these are] masterpieces that they hadn’t known.”
Five works by Stravinsky have the word ‘symphony’ – singular or plural – in their titles; of these, the three works recorded for this CD represent Stravinsky’s mature response to the idea of the classical symphony. Having said this, they challenge our notions of what constitutes a symphony.
In 1930-31, when Serge Koussevitzky commissioned Stravinsky to write a symphony to mark the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 50th anniversary season, he could hardly have expected a choral work with an unusual orchestra lacking clarinets, violins and violas - and with two pianos. “My publisher had requested an orchestral piece without chorus, but I had had the psalm symphony idea in mind for some time, and that is what I insisted on composing,” the composer later wrote. He also took the original meaning of the word “symphony” in the sense of a simple and powerful amalgam of sounds. The Symphony of Psalms consists of settings of Latin language verses from Psalm 38, 39 and 150 and includes a double fugue and a dance leading to a final Alleluia.
The Symphony in C was commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to celebrate what would be its 50th anniversary in the 1940-41 season. The composer conducted the premiere with the CSO on 7 November 1940. Although Stravinsky composed the work in four movements and scored it for a Beethoven orchestra, he nevertheless managed to introduce distinctly non-classical harmonic relationships and Russian-inspired melodies that cast the symphonic form in a new light. “My new symphony is going to be classical in spirit, more concise in its form than Beethoven,” he said. “Instead of all the chords gravitating toward one final tonic chord, all notes gravitate toward a single note. Thus this symphony will be neither a symphony in C major nor a symphony in C minor but simply a symphony in C.” The work was composed during some of the most difficult years of Stravinsky’s life, during the dramatic upheavals of the deaths of his daughter, wife and mother, his own illness, the threat of war in Europe that resulted in his moving to the United States (initially to Massachusetts), and finally his remarriage and relocation to Los Angeles. Many years later, when recording the Symphony in C, Stravinsky indicated that it was still difficult for him to speak about it because of its tragic associations.
The Symphony in Three Movements had its origins in three separate works but became a symphony when the New York Philharmonic commissioned a Victory Symphony at the end of the Second World War. The first movement had been part of a concerto for orchestra, with a major role for the piano, composed in 1942. The slow second movement, in which a solo harp replaces the piano, began life as music for the film The Song of Bernadette (1943). Stravinsky later added what he called a ‘war plot’ to the energetic finale, with a final chord composed at the time of Hiroshima. The work was premiered in Carnegie Hall in January 1946 with the composer conducting the New York Philharmonic.
Sir Simon Rattle has been Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Berliner Philharmoniker since 2002. In 2007/2008, the Orchestra celebrated its 125th anniversary with Simon Rattle leading 72 of 93 symphony concerts in Berlin and on tour in Austria, Switzerland, the U.S.A., France, the Baltic States and Scandinavia
Rattle’s association with EMI dates back to the 1970s and has resulted in many award-winning and ground-breaking releases. Previous critically acclaimed recordings with the Berliner Philharmonker encompass works by Bruckner, Brahms, Holst, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, Schubert, Mahler and Debussy. Their Holst’s The Planets CD won ‘Classical Recording of the Year’ at the 2007 Classical Brit Awards and their recording of Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem, with Thomas Quasthoff, Dorothea Röschmann and the Rundfunkchor Berlin won a Gramophone Award in October 2007 and a Grammy Award in February 2008.
