Stravinsky completed the vocal score for the ballet Les noces ( " The Wedding " ) while living in a villa in Switzerland in the summer of 1917. His home was near the town square, where women would often gather to knit. He’d play bits of his new creation on the piano; the women would look up for a moment before apprehending the source of the strange sounds. " C’est le monsieur russe! " they would say, then resume their knitting.
Although Les noces sounds nothing like the pagan Russia Stravinsky had painted so stunningly in Le sacre du printemps ( " The Rite of Spring " ), it’s just as russe as the work that had made his name four years earlier. Whereas Sacre sought to present a natural ritual, the vernal renewal of the earth, through a Russian prism, Les noces depicted a societal one — that of marriage.
Stravinsky had the idea for a " wedding cantata " in 1912, while he was still working on Sacre. Using a 19th-century anthology of Russian folk verse, he assembled bits of conversation from a typical peasant wedding ceremony. In a conversation with Robert Craft, Stravinsky connected this fragmentation of the narrative to Joyce’s literary technique in Ulysses. He further depersonalized the whole affair by having the solo voices take on different roles — thus, the bridegroom’s words are sung by the tenor in one scene and the bass in another.
Although the music was complete by 1917, the orchestration gave him more trouble than in any other work. His original concept called for an orchestra of 150, but none of the various groupings of instruments he tried satisfied him. Only in 1921 did he realize how to score Les noces, and the decision was crucial for his future direction. " I suddenly realized that an orchestra of four pianos and percussion would satisfy all of my concepts, " he told Craft. " It would be at the same time perfectly homogeneous, perfectly impersonal, and perfectly mechanical. "
This uniform, motorized sound picture may shock a listener who knows only the florid sound world of Sacre, Firebird, and Petrushka. With Les noces, Stravinsky embraced constraint as the driving force of artistic inspiration. The limited timbres make the score’s dissonances stand out in high relief. And shorn of their lush instrumental clothing, his jagged rhythms sound more aggressive than ever. It’s those rhythms and the voices — lamenting, shouting, screaming, and occasionally singing — that give the work its Russian flavor.
When Les noces was finally presented in staged form, in 1923, the critical response was largely negative. Today, it’s easier to see this as one of Stravinsky’s most powerful large-scale works. It has, however, not often been recorded. Stravinsky did it in 1959; the performance has Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, Lukas Foss, and Roger Sessions at the pianos but also some unsteady singing. A better bet is the incendiary performance on Deutsche Grammophon led by Leonard Bernstein, who’s reported to have declared it his favorite Stravinsky work. The quartet of pianists includes Martha Argerich and Krystian Zimerman; the whole thing crackles with manic energy.
Live performances are likewise rare, but next Friday the Back Bay Chorale will be presenting Les noces with Stravinsky’s Sonata for Two Pianos and songs for chorus by Tchaikovsky. James Olesen will conduct; Nancy Armstrong, Kamala Soparkar, Rockland Osgood, and Aaron Engebreth will be the soloists; and Leslie Amper, Randall Hodgkinson, Jean Anderson Collier, and Linda Osborn-Blaschke will be at the keyboards. That’s May 9 at 8 p.m. at Sanders Theatre, and tickets are $15 to $35. Call (617) 648-3885.
RAISE YOUR VOICES. May’s second weekend is all choral, all the time. The Cantata Singers close their season with two performances of Bach’s monumental Mass in B minor at Jordan Hall May 9 at 8 p.m. and May 11 at 3 p.m. Tickets are $16 to $44; call (617) 536-2412. The Masterworks Chorale unfurls another rarity: Arthur Honegger’s cantata King David. Allen Lannom conducts; the soloists include Phyllis Hoffman and William Hite. That’s on May 10 at 8 p.m. at Sanders Theatre, and tickets are $16 to $36; call (617) 496-2222. And the Longwood Symphony offers yet another performance of Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem, on May 10 at 8 p.m. at Jordan Hall. Tickets for that one are $20; call (617) 332-7011.
