Igor Stravinsky - Music for Piano & Orchestra (Steven Osborne; Ilan Volkov)

Information

Composer: Igor Stravinsky

• Song of the Volga Boatmen, for wind and percussion
• Concerto for piano and wind instruments
• Capriccio for piano and orchestra
• Movements for piano and orchestra
• Concerto in D for string orchestra
• Canon (on a Russian Popular Tune)

Steven Osborne, piano

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

Ilan Volkov, conductor

Date: 2013

Label: Hyperion

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Review

Stravinsky once described the piano as the ‘fulcrum’ of his compositional activity, presumably meaning that he used it to lever ideas into action. This record of his music for piano and orchestra is, however, best taken as light music. The opening and closing pieces are, of course, trivia, a rather plain setting of the ‘Song of the Volga Boatmen’ dating from 1917 and a one-minute canon on the final melody in The Firebird written for Pierre Monteux. The Concerto in D, for strings, is a pleasant divertimento, its central Arioso reminding us how much Stravinsky admired Tchaikovsky.

Of the three works for piano and orchestra, the most severe is the Concerto for Piano and Wind, written in 1923 24 when Stravinsky was embarking upon his most neo-classical phase. It places huge demands on soloist, surely conductor, and also recording engineers, all of whom sail through unscathed by the technical problems and the difficult sonorities (full woodwind and brass, no strings apart from double basses). The Capriccio is, as its name implies, a work written to beguile, which it does, and would benefit from an altogether more light-hearted approach than the extremely efficient Steven Osborne gives it. His technique is up to all the demands placed upon him, including the very difficult Movements, written in 1958 59 as Stravinsky was entering Webern-like waters, and approaching Boulez in complexity. No one can possibly hear how the maths all works out but that does not matter: Stravinsky had a much better ear than most, certainly than the more rigorous serialists of the day (the 1950s). In fact, the five short movements can sound – how Stravinsky would have hated the word! – rather pretty.

— John Warrack

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Igor Stravinsky (June 17, 1882 – April 6, 1971) was a Russian composer. Son of an operatic bass, he studied privately with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov from 1902 to 1908. Soon after the impresario Sergei Diaghilev commissioned Stravinsky to write three ballets for the Ballets Russes: Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913). The last of which, with its shifting and audacious rhythms, was a landmark in music history. Later Stravinsky also adopted Neoclassicism and serialism in his composition. His major Neoclassical works include Oedipus rex (1927) and the Symphony of Psalms (1930).

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Steven Osborne (born 12 March 1971) is a Scottish pianist. He studied with Richard Beauchamp at St Mary's Music School, and with Renna Kellaway at the Royal Northern College of Music. Osborne won first prize in the Clara Haskil International Piano Competition in Switzerland in 1991, and was a BBC New Generation Artist. He has an extensive repertoire, spanning classical, contemporary, and 20th-century works. In his twenty-five years as a Hyperion recording artist, Osborne's thirty-four releases have accumulated numerous awards in the UK, France, Germany and the USA, including two Gramophone Awards.

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Ilan Volkov (born 8 September 1976 in Tel Aviv) is an Israeli conductor. Trained at the Rubin Academy in Jerusalem and the Royal Academy of Music in London, he gained early prominence through roles with youth orchestras and as assistant to Seiji Ozawa at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Volkov became the youngest chief conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in 2003 and later served as its principal guest conductor. He also led the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and has held guest roles internationally. Noted for championing overlooked works, he has recorded extensively, particularly music from the early 20th century.

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