Hum me a few bars

Stravinsky performed the solo part to his own Concerto for Piano and Winds some forty times during the decade after it composition in 1924. Any pianist who knows the piece will tell you that this is impressive, as this music is not at all easy, and some passages in the Bach-meets-Ragtime outer movements are virtual mine fields of rhythmic surprise.

More impressive is the evidence that the composer played the concerto from memory. We know this because he himself relates the story of how at the first performance he was struck dumb by a memory lapse just as he was about to begin the second movement. After some struggling about to recall the opening, he had to appeal to the conductor, Serge Koussevitsky, to hum the opening melody for him (presumably sotto voce) to jump start his memory.

There are some other stories about memory issues during Stravinsky’s public career as a pianist. But I don’t care—I am still impressed. In their book about Stravinsky, “The Apollonian Clockwork,” composer Louis Andriessen and musicologist Elmer Schonberger write about the difficulty of memorizing Stravinsky’s music, particularly the “neoclassic” music from the twenties and thirties. The chapter, one that makes you break out it in a nervous sweat just to read it, is titled “The Ordeals of Memory.” They conjure up a pianist lying in bed trying to remember how this same Stravinsky piano concerto goes. “He will, at the very most, if he even gets that far, get stuck at the cadenza of the first movement; or worse, get trapped in a vicious circle of dove-tailing rhythms and snake-like motifs biting at their own tails.”

This maddening capacity to delude the expectations of the performer (and listener) is unique to Stravinsky and says a lot about what sets his music apart from all other. “The music of Stravinsky is at odds with memory,” they say. This is due to the music’s close-but-not-close-enough relation to expectation. In the listening process our innate sense of harmonic and strophic symmetry telegraphs to us that a certain event is about to happen. A series of phrase repetitions or a harmonic “cadence” presents a kind of set-up, the “predicate” of the musical syllogism, as it were. The listener’s “ear” readies itself for the resolution of the proposition. A cunning composer, a Mozart or a Schumann or a Wagner, will delay the gratification or offer up a surprise alternative. But they take care to preserve the essential symmetries.

In Stravinsky, however, the music behaves like an errant truant. His phrases and harmonic cadences at first signal to us that we’re comfortably located in the rational universe of Bach or Pergolesi. But then Stravinsky trips us up by adding an extra fraction of a beat or by arbitrarily extending a phrase beyond its expected length.

These phrases and their harmonic underpinnings are like Harpo Marx misbehaving at a dinner party. The constant upsetting of decorum becomes infectious, and we ultimately join in, crashing the china and knocking over the furniture. The absence of strings (except for the double basses) even further removes the sound from the nineteenth century ideal. Stravinsky did away with strings altogether in quite a few pieces from this era—“Les Noces,” “Symphonies for Wind Instruments,” “Octet,” and this concerto. In the Symphony of Psalms there are no violins in the orchestra. You get the feeling that he could only strike or blow something in his imagination, that drawing a bow across a string was simply too luxurious and sensual an act. He uses the violin in “L’Histoire du Soldat” alternatively as a percussion instrument and as a scraping, strident country fiddle.

I first did the Concerto for Piano and Winds in 1983 with, of all people, Keith Jarrett. It was Keith’s first time doing the piece, and to my knowledge he never played it again. This is a pity, because his performance was special, and of course it was rhythmically on the money, so to speak. And appropriately enough, on that same program we followed the concerto with the first performance in America of Louis Andriessen’s “De Staat.” That was over 25 years ago. Next May I’ll put those same two pieces together on the same program, this time with Jeremy Denk as soloist, for concerts at Zankel Hall in New York and the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia. But if you can’t wait to hear the marvelous Mr. Denk boogie through those asymmetrical phrase groupings, you can join us later this month in London or Paris, where we’ll follow it with, gulp, “City Noir.”

I will be using a score for both pieces.