Stravinsky: Elegy for Violin Solo | Baiba Skride (violin)

Igor Stravinsky’s Elegy requires the performer to master its unusual and often intense compositional style, including creating complex textures with a single instrument, mastering harmonics, and making very quiet passages sound nearly silent. Originally written for the viola, the Elegy can also be played on the violin. Here, the piece is performed by Latvian violinist Baiba Skride as the encore to her concert at the Gewandhaus Leipzig on May 17, 2019.

Dance played a central role in the work of the great Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, who left Russia after the 1917 October Revolution and became first a French, later an American, citizen. After all, it was the three ballets that Stravinsky wrote for impresario Sergei Diaghilev's Russian Ballet dance company (“The Firebird,” “Petrushka,” and “The Rite of Spring”) at the beginning of the 20th century that helped the young St. Petersburg composer achieve his international breakthrough.

For Stravinsky, dance and rhythm were the “father of music;” the melody and singing its “mother.” Choreographers across generations agree that Stravinsky’s music is always danceable, even when he did not write it specifically for dance. That includes the Elegy, written as a musical obituary for Alphonse Onnou, a friend of the composer and founder of the renowned Pro Arte Quartet. The famous choreographer and another close friend of Stravinsky, George Balanchine, staged the Elegy three times in different versions as a neoclassical ballet — in 1948, 1966, and 1982.

The Elegy is especially well-suited as an encore: just five minutes long, the work offers scope for interpretation while being a complete, fully-fledged artistic statement, not merely a virtuoso piece. The opening section is a kind of song, while the middle section contains elements of a fugue. After the climax at the end of the fugue, the Elegy closes with a reprise of the opening.

© 2019 Accentus Music

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