David Robertson: evaluation

Transcript context

…Your [November] 2025 concert with the New York Philharmonic — why do the 1911 Petrushka and not the 1947? Oh, the Petrushka is an interesting case, as many of the works of Stravinsky are. It has to do with World War I and international copyright. Stravinsky made a small version of The Firebird, which is referred to as the Firebird Suite 1919 because it was published in 1919. This was in the aftermath of the First World War. I think he received some money for the actual score from the publisher, but he never in the rest of his life, received any rights from this piece. It’s the piece of his which was played the most during his lifetime, and to some extent, still is. When the Second World War came along, and he had found refuge in the United States, he realized, “I need to revise a number of my works so that I can get the copyright.” Some of the works were made more practical, and some of the works were done entirely for financial reasons. There’s a revision of Persephone, his cantata for chorus and solos, vocal solos and orchestra, and he changed one note in the second bassoon part, but in Petrushka, he changed a lot. One of the things that happened was that there’s a large piano part in the early part of the work, and then the piano never plays again. This comes from him thinking, while he was working with Diaghilev, that he wanted to write a piano concerto, and so these sketches for the piano concerto came in. The woodwind section is reduced. The number of harps is reduced to one. There are a number of things that are done with tempos to make it easier to conduct. For example, one of the tempo relations, which I really like, is that the opening theme of “The Shrovetide Fair” has [vocables], and it has an eighth note pulse in the horns going [vocables]. He wants, at one point, to just up the tempo a little bit, and that means that he would like seven eighth notes in the time of these six, which means one, and two, and three, and one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, three, and that’s hard for conductors to do. In the ’47 version, he sanctions, which I think was probably because he would also like to conduct it, because you make money conducting, and so, he turned it into eighth note equals eighth note, and I find this is a very sad way of doing things. Boulez and I talked about this, and he said, ironically, it will turn out, when you are looking at a composer’s works, always trust the original. He never did the ’47, or very rarely. I’ve done it occasionally, and I always feel, “Oh, why did I agree to do this?” I go back to insisting on the 1911. The colors are much better and the actual beauty of the orchestration — where it comes from in the Russian tradition with Rimsky-Korsakov — that’s all much clearer and much more evident in the way you hear it. s are much better and the actual beauty of the orchestration — where it comes from in the Russian tradition with Rimsky-Korsakov — that’s all much clearer and much more evident in the way you hear it. Of course, going back to Boulez, he revised his works all the time, and so, I find it wonderful that a composer said, “Oh no, trust the original,” and yet he would never say go back to the original of Le Visage nuptial. At the same time, I can understand this because there are times when you say, “Ah, I did put the metronome mark too fast.” Or “Actually, that trumpet part would work once on a month of Sundays, but not normally, so let me be more practical here.”…

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