Igor Stravinsky

In the early 1920s, the recent war having wreaked havoc on his personal finances, Igor Stravinsky set about ensuring the future security of his family by exploring avenues of musical life more immediately lucrative. One result of this was a rich series of works featuring the pianoforte in a solo role, designed quite specifically with Stravinsky himself as the pianist. In 1921, he fashioned three extracts from the ballet Petrushka into the Trois Mouvements de Petrouchka for Arthur Rubinstein. Finding, however, that he could not successfully bring off so technically demanding a work, the composer made certain that all of his forthcoming pianoforte compositions lay well within the realm of his own technical capabilities. The Concerto for Piano and Winds was composed in 1923-1924 for performance at one of Koussevitzky's Paris Concerts. It is the first representative in a new line of works that would eventually reach into the last decade of his active life, though by the time of Movements in 1959, Stravinsky was no longer in a position to give the premiere himself. In addition, the concerto is the first large-scale concert work to put to use Stravinsky's "new" neo-Classical style. Since the premiere at the Paris Opera House on May 22, 1924, it has become one of his best-known and most dearly loved works.

Perhaps the most immediately striking aspect of the concerto, ignoring the strong affinities that the basic musical gestures have to those of the Baroque era, is the removal of the string section from the ensemble. Only the string basses remain, Stravinsky having decided that the same all-wind ensemble that he had already used in the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, the Octet, and, for all intents and purposes, the opera Mavra better complemented the timbre of the pianoforte.

The work is in three movements: 1) Largo - Allegro; 2) Larghissimo; and 3) Allegro. After the mock-grandiose, fundamentally Baroque Largo orchestral introduction, the piano enters with a rhythmically energized theme from which almost all the material of the movement is drawn in one way or another. Following the precedent set in his last few piano works, the piano is used in a very percussive manner. After a very long absence, sonata form, or something very like it, has returned to Stravinsky's bag of tricks in this movement. The Largo introduction comes back, much modified, as a coda. The piano begins the second movement alone, offering a lyric theme whose gentle steadiness is balanced by thick, ponderous chords beneath. Stravinsky makes room for two cadenzas as the movement unfolds. At the end of the final Allegro movement, the Largo introduction to the first movement is heard from again, only to this time fade away into a pause that suddenly bursts into the Vivo plunge to the final C major cadence. In 1950, Stravinsky made a revision of the concerto, making a few small changes of instrumentation and many more substantial alterations to the metronome and tempo markings; in the 1950 version, the title of the second movement has been changed from Larghissimo to Largo.