In Stravinsky concerto, it’s winds to the fore
NewsIvan Fischer, in his latest Stravinsky performance, placed the wind instruments in front of the Budapest Festival Orchestra.
The idea was to highlight their many interactions with the soloist in the violin concerto.
Patricia Kopatchinskaja, the soloists involved, says: ‘Very fun to play like this!’
Has this been tried before?
Fischer does it also every time he conducts Schubert 9th. It works wonderfully in Schubert, and Mehta started doing the same- I saw a very successful performance with the IPO in one of his farewell concerts with the orchestra,
This makes sense as the violin concerto has a lot of circus ground sounds in it
Leopold Stokowski said that placing the winds in the back which is customary can cause forcing of tone especially in delicate passages. He at least experimented with strings to one side, winds to the other, with brass and most percussion in the back, with harp anc celeste brought forward.
I doubt if Stokowski ever seated an orchestra in the way Fischer did but he’d strongly approve of letting the music dictate the seating more than tradition.
In 1970, Stokowski conducted the Juilliard Orchestra with that setup in Capriccio Espagnol. I was on first stand viola in front of the podium, between the solo violin and clarinet. I smiled at the stereo effect as they traded solos. Stokowski stopped the orchestra and pointed his long finger down at me. “You there, why are you smiling?” The orchestra became silent, knowing that he was known for kicking players out of rehearsal. Taking a moment to think and swallow, I responded “It sounded so good, maestro, I was happy.” He briefly stared and then said “Orchestra, letter B.”
I have played for Stokes -(Please don’t take a photo until I have combed my hair) and his ideas on orchestral placement were ludicrous, and ever changing. Yes the Stravinsky Violin Cocerto is a showpiece for ww, but any change of the basic orch plan only indicates inability on the part of the conductor.
Stokowski’s experiments entered the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) produced by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) as ‘seating disorder’, apparently reported by a frustrated viola player who had to change his seat at every item of the programs.
Ivan Fischer & BFO did it with Vilde Frang last year
I saw him conduct the BFO in Carnegie Hall in the late 1990s. They did Bartok 2nd Piano Concerto (w/Andras Schiff), and IIRC he put the winds up front there, too.
This is not a bad idea, since the piece is written for a chamber orchestra, i.e. with a small nr of strings, thus specified in the score. The sound should be comparable to that of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos.
Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto is one of his master pieces.
Schenker, who suffered from infinite irritation about Stravinsky’s fame and his neoclassicism combined with sayings of ‘retour à l’ordre’ and other classicist burps, did a thorough analysis of S’s violin concerto, demonstrating how S totally misunderstood baroque music and got it all wrong, and that the music was the opposite of returning to order. In Schenker’s view: it was an entirely wrong piece saturated with mistakes, showing that S had not the faintest idea about baroque style. But by analysing the piece in this way, Schenker merely showed what Stravinsky was doing, so – contrary to his intentions – it was actually quite interesting and helpful for people who wanted to know how Stravinsky ‘did it’.
I think that IS’s marvellous Violin Concerto was also on Teddy Adorno’s hate-list – what better recommendation could there be?
Sorry about that story – it was Stravinsky’s piano concerto that Schenker analysed. But the point remains the same.
As I recall the New Grove (i.e. the edition that came out in the 80s) had an interesting article about orchestral placement that included a number of different Stokowski seating plans.
Stokowski had a mania about seating arrangements. Even at home he would experiment with his wife, and with guests, who always refrained from repeting the experience, because while they had to try-out many different positions, the food on the table got cold. S also designed a different seat for the bathroom, which was exhibited in the NY Museum of Modern Art in the eighties, but was removed after his family complained.
It was just the brass, actually, that Fischer placed immediately behind Pat Kop.
I heard that Herrmann Scherchen also did this according to his motto “Alles hörbar machen” (“everything must be hearable”)
Does Patricia Kopatchinskaja always play barefoot?