Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
Late Works
Cappella Amsterdam
Noord Nederlands Orkest/Daniel Reuss
rec. 2024, Grote Zaal, De Oosterpoort, in Groningen, The Netherlands
Reviewed from a FLAC download 96kHz/24-bit
Texts and translations included
Pentatone PTC5187489 [72]

Nearly 20 years ago Daniel Reuss directed what I still feel is the definitive version of arguably the most Russian of all Stravinsky’s works, Les Noces (Harmonia Mundi HMC801913). It’s very welcome news that in this new recording from Pentatone, Reuss has returned to choral and vocal Stravinsky, this time to an intelligently programmed recital of (mostly) the composer’s late works, composed using serial techniques and generally sounding a world apart from Les Noces.

I say ‘mostly’ because there are a couple of interesting outliers: Chorale from 1920, played here on the harmonium, a piece that was the basis for the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, and Stravinsky’s 1926 slavonic setting of the Our Father, Otche Nash. A world apart too, perhaps, but both serve as a surprisingly apt lead-ins to much later pieces. The eerie performance of Chorale by Dirk Luijmes and Martin Logar provides a suitably unsettling preface to the canonically predicated In Memoriam Dylan Thomas of 1954. If the latter was a sort of experiment for Stravinsky’s move towards serialism, using as it does just a five-note row, there’s no doubt the method provided a route to a miniature masterpiece. It’s incandescently performed here with gilded strings and trombone dirge-canons bracketing Guy Cutting’s beautiful rendition of the famous Thomas poem, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’. Otche Nash is heard immediately before Threni, the warmth of its Russian Orthodox harmonies immediately stripped from one’s ear by the austerity of the instrumental opening of Threni, Stravinsky’s setting of part of the Lamentations of Jeremiah. When Cappella Amsterdam joins to sing the ‘Incipit’ the effect is lapidary, as if each word is being lightly engraved on one’s mind. It’s Stravinsky’s longest and most formally strict serial work, but Reuss and his forces rapidly make one forget any academic and theoretical strictures and instead focus on the beauty and awe of Stravinsky’s musical refraction of the ascetic text. The soloists and Cappella Amsterdam have a perfectly judged homogeneity of tone when needed but also somehow conjure sparks from the interstices of the score to winningly humane effect, a little more so perhaps than the nevertheless excellent Collegium Vocale Gent under Philippe Herreweghe (PHI LPH020).

A fascinating sprinkling of shorter pieces separates Threni from Requiem Canticles on the disc. Two more memorial pieces shine in particular: the Elegy for JFK, where what feels like twelve-tone Auden (‘Why then, why there/why thus…’) strikingly meets twelve-tone Stravinsky, beautifully sung by Berit Norbakken, and Introitus, Stravinsky’s tribute to T.S. Eliot, a four part choral setting with instruments, which in its less than five minutes feels like a blueprint for Requiem Canticles with its powerful exploration of the possibilities of the combination of the liturgy and serial technique.

The performance of the Requiem Canticles themselves which follows feels like not just the fitting culmination of a fine recital but provides the most vivid and moving realisation of this sudden flowering of Stravinsky’s work in serialism I’ve heard, a work which simultaneously and sensationally imparts ‘Russianness’, after what feels like a long gap. (Musicological analysis may tell us that the notion of the gap is illusory, that the octatonic progressions and harmonies so beloved of Stravinsky are omnipresent to some extent in virtually everything he wrote, even in some of the other serial works on the disc; ‘latent’ as the composer put it. One’s ear doesn’t always quite believe it though.) Listening to this coruscating account one immediately understands why Nicholas Nabokov felt on hearing the work that Stravinsky had somehow ‘overpowered’ serial technique and one feels with him that it is an instinctive, and ‘totally lovable’ work as well as a hieratic one.

More so than the fine recordings by Herreweghe and Oliver Knussen (DG 4470682) Reuss and his performers very deliberately lean into the nostalgic elements which suffuse the work and differentiate it from the other serial compositions: recollections of Stravinsky’s setting of the Creed in 1932, more than a hint of key patterns from the Symphonies of Wind Instruments and above all, appropriately given Reuss’s proven affinity with the work, glimpses of the soundscape of Les Noces. But it’s the way Reuss balances these flashes of memory and emotion with the effect of the very modern compositional elements—what Milton Babbitt called Stravinsky’s ‘Verticalism’—which makes his reading so compelling. The Noord Nederlands Orkest play with great momentum and pulsative energy, but there’s a profound wistfulness too as those tubular bells (straight out of Les Noces) sound in the ‘Postlude’. Reuss rightly permits the singers of Cappella Amsterdam more warmth here than in the other works on the disc. Listen to their astounding singing of the ‘Libera Me’ for a wonderful example of this where falsobordone (in a ‘serialist work’!) is set against a Ligeti-like chant/murmur. Nabokov again: ‘I was as fully taken and shaken by [Requiem Canticles] as I used to be in the thirties and forties by every new composition of Stravinsky.’ Me too by this performance of it, the most impressive choral Stravinsky I’ve heard since that 2006 disc by Reuss.

It turns out that the Requiem Canticles aren’t quite the last music we hear.  Two Sacred Songs, Stravinsky’s last completed work, is a miniature orchestration of two songs from Wolf’s Spanisches Liederbuch. Even after the Requiem Canticles Stravinsky wanted to say something more about death it seems and these two Wolf miniatures were the medium. Marianne Beate Kielland is the ideal interpreter, capturing the essential mystery of the oblique texts which Wolf/Stravinsky colour with ambiguity and what feels like regret.

I didn’t expect to start 2026 with late Stravinsky on repeat, but that is what’s happened and I am the richer for it. There is to be an accompanying book and film, which if the CD is anything to go by will be worth waiting for.

Dominic Hartley

Contents
(Soloists listed after individual work)
Chorale – Dirk Luijmes and Martin Logar (harmonium)
In Memoriam Dylan Thomas – Guy Cutting (tenor)
Otche Nash
Threni – Berit Norbakken (soprano) Guy Cutting (tenor) Tobias Berndt (bass) Marianne Beate Kielland (mezzo-soprano) Thomas Walker(tenor) Stephan MacLeod (bass)
Double Canon
Anthem
Elegy for J.F.K. – Berit Norbakken (soprano)
Epitaphium
Introitus
Requiem Canticles – Marianne Beate Kielland (mezzo-soprano) Tobias Berndt (bass)
Hugo Wolf (1860-1903)arr. Stravinsky
Two Sacred Songs – Marianne Beate Kielland (mezzo-soprano)

Buying this recording via a link below generates revenue for MWI, which helps the site remain free