Dancing through adversity

Five musicians from the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra and pianist Sarah Watkins set out this week on a 10-centre Chamber Music New Zealand tour with a programme called “Tales of the ’20s”. At a time when our orchestras have been struggling to bring concerts to live audiences, this small-scale ensemble will play music from a century ago – and there are contemporary parallels. These carefree songs and dances emerged from the shadows of a dark and disrupted period in history.

Stravinsky’s popular work L’Histoire du Soldat (The Soldier’s Tale) is probably the best-known of the six works in the programme. It was written in 1918 at the end of World War 1 and after the Russian Revolution,  a time Stravinsky described as “the hardest period I have ever experienced.” Before war broke out in 1914, he had made the life-changing decision to move his family to Switzerland; his wife had tuberculosis and his four children included a new-born.  The 31-year-old composer, already acclaimed in Europe for his works with Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet, did not set foot on Russian soil again for almost 50 years.

Stravinsky was also in financial difficulties. Political conflict had cut off access to his family’s estate in Russia and his Berlin publisher was no longer sending royalties. So the entrepreneurial composer joined forces with Swiss novelist Charles Ramuz and hatched a plan for a stage work that could be produced on the proverbial shoestring, portable enough to tour with just a handful of performers. The result was The Soldier’s Tale, a musical-theatre piece for seven instrumentalists plus actors-cum-dancers and narrator.

Igor Stravinsky

“…the hardest period I have ever experienced.”

Portrait of Stravinsky by Robert Delaunay, in the Garman Ryan Collection Photo: Public Domain

The work reveals a new Stravinsky. His ensemble is very like an American jazz band with bassoon instead of saxophone. “Jazz meant a wholly new sound in my music,” he said later, “and Histoire marks my final break with the Russian orchestral school in which I had been fostered.”  Musically the jazz influence is particularly evident in the movement called Ragtime. Later he drew a Suite from the work for piano trio, the version we’ll hear on the up-coming New Zealand tour.

There are also fascinating stories behind the other five works on this inventive programme. Vaughan Williams’ Six Studies in English Folksong was written by a composer shattered by the war and is a nostalgic piece looking back to an earlier time. Shostakovich was a teenager at the Conservatory when he wrote his romantic first Piano Trio in 1923 but the shadow of Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan and its dark impact on his career was just a few years away.

Perhaps the least-known composer featured is American Florence Price (1887 – 1953). Her  three miniatures for violin and piano will introduce the unique musical voice of an African-American woman who faced both racial and gender discrimination. Comparable to Vaughan Williams’ use of folk music, Price uses her own heritage of spirituals and hints of jazz in poetic and expressive melodies. Perhaps at some stage we may hear her orchestral music; only the Chicago Symphony Orchestra paid them any attention during her lifetime.

The première of a brand new sextet by New Zealand bassoonist/composer Ben Hoadley brings more dancing to the tour programme. Composed this year, Cave Dances looks back to  the intriguing story of what Hoadley calls “one of the hottest tickets” in New Zealand in the “roaring” 1920’s. A ball was held regularly in a giant cave on the Manukau Harbour. “Guests arrived on horseback and by ferry to Whatipū Lodge and walked in their finery through the rugged coastal terrain,” says the composer. They danced till the small hours and couples apparently slipped off to dally in the dark corners of the cave and surrounding bush.  

Hoadley has written for a sextet – clarinet, trumpet, bassoon, violin, cello and piano – which matches that of La Revue de cuisine (The Kitchen Revue) by Bohuslav Martinů, the witty ballet music that ends the programme. The composer brought his Czech heritage and Parisian jazz together to tell a curious story of the complicated flirtations of five anthropomorphic kitchen utensils (Pot, Lid, Twirling Stick, Dishcloth and Broom.) 

The four-movement Suite version of La Revue, which includes Charleston and Tango, determined the make-up of this New Zealand touring ensemble. The work is a favourite of Chamber Music New Zealand’s Jack Hobbs, who enjoyed curating the programme to fill a gap at much shorter notice than CMNZ’s planning cycle usually allows. “It’s an evening of fun,” he says. “I hope the audience will go away tapping their feet – but also acknowledging that this year hasn’t gone well so there’s an undertone of seriousness in this music that invites reflection.”

Footnote: I hope this New Zealand tour has a happier outcome than Stravinsky’s. The first performance of The Soldier’s Tale was a success in spite of its meagre budget, but sadly, though the tour plan was, in Stravinsky’s words, “elaborated to the last detail, even to the itinerary, and all this on empty pockets”, it was scuttled by the international Spanish ‘flu epidemic of 1918. Sound familiar? Let’s wish this captivating programme every success.

“Tales of the ’20s” will tour between September 27 September – 15 October to Hamilton, New Plymouth, Palmerston North, Wellington, Napier, Auckland, Nelson, Christchurch, Dunedin & Invercargill. More details here.

For more about Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale you can listen to my illustrated Radio NZ Concert Curtain Raiser talk here.

You can read more about how bassoonist Ben Hoadley has focussed on composition this year here.