Creator Once More

At the Santa Fe Opera, the Hamburg Staatsoper and the New York City Ballet, the dancers and singers were preparing gala evenings in his honor. In Mexico City and Melbourne. Johannesburg. Moscow and Tel Aviv, symphony orchestras were tuning up for concerts to celebrate his birthday. Recordings of the old man's music were at full flood, and the British Broadcasting Corp. was boldly planning a year's project to play all 102 of his works. But as he neared his 80th birthday, in company with another of the century's great creators (see ART), Igor Feodorovich Stravinsky was his own best celebrator. In Toronto last week he shuffled to the podium, looking owlishly like Sir Cedric Hardwicke, and conducted the CBC Symphony in some of the best music to flow from his pen in years.

Some of Stravinsky's recent works, such as his seven-minute Gesnaldo Monumentum, which is little more than an orchestration of three madrigals by Don Carlo Gesualdo (circa 1560-1613), have suggested that nowadays the old revolutionary talks better about music (in interviews with Protege Conductor Robert Craft) than he composes. Although, in the U.S. at least, Stravinsky remains the most widely played living composer, the works that turn up most often in the concert halls are early masterpieces like Firebird and Petronchka, with their gorgeous colors, their richly varied rhythms and brilliant orchestrations.

Substitute for Vitality. But Stravinsky, of all living composers, is the one who can least stand still; and today, after moving through the classicist waters of Pidcinella and Oedipus Rex, he has turned to the serial technique. He is as adept as ever at what he once regarded as the discipline of an alien school.

Convinced that serialism "is the way of the future," Stravinsky played upon it with exalted dignity in his religious work Threni, and with blazing excitement in his ballet score, Agon. But some critics feared that in such works as Movements for Piano and Orchestra, as Stravinsky worked toward the refinement of sound, he was substituting mere mechanical skill for invention and vitality. One of last week's new works -- Eight Instrumental Miniatures -- seemed to confirm that impression. Consisting of "recomposed" material from 1921. his Miniatures were charming, light, mellow and infinitely adroit, but they did little more than sound echoes of such early Stravinsky triumphs as The Soldier's Tale.

Technique & Feeling. Stravinsky's new cantata. A Sermon, A Narrative and A Prayer, was a far more impressive achieve ment. Only 15 minutes long, it was scored for alto, tenor, speaker, chorus and full orchestra. Yet it had so lean a texture that virtually every detail was visible -- as if a chamber group were playing. The piece was remarkable not only for its intensity and melodic freedom but for the intricacy and beauty of the vocal writing, particularly in the moving duet of alto and tenor in the Prayer, and in the Narrative about the stoning of St. Stephen. Rarely since he turned to serialism has Stravinsky so closely or effectively wedded technique to feeling.

The Toronto audience, conscious that it had a legend before its eyes, applauded the program frenetically. The legend beamed. "I see you like it," he said after the Miniatures. "We do it again." To the delight of his fans, he promptly got the orchestra to do just that.

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