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“The Russian Stravinsky.” Brooklyn Academy of Music, 6, 7, 8 May 1994. Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra. Folk Music and Dance Performed by the Dmitry Pokrovsky Ensemble.

The Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra's 1993-1994 SOUNDWAVE concert series concluded in early May with Brooklyn Academy of Music's signature rite of spring: a three-day "Russian Stravinsky" festival. Now, when the urgent search for new direction in the performing arts is underway, the Academy is radically revising its traditional repertoire of current "isms": modernism, minimalism, transcendentalism, post-modernism. Indeed, relentless exploration is expected of the Academy's audience, from Europe's center to its margins, beyond temples of "high culture." In the 1990s, for example, eastern European artists have prevailed at the Academy: Sofia Gubaidulina, Henryk Gorecki and Alfred Schnittke have passed its test for front-line contemporaneity. The treatment of modern western "classics" has also been marked by irreverence for stone-cast canons and inviolable reputations. Reviews focused on polemics instead of performance. Before the festival, Oregon composer David Schiff publicized both the Taruskin-Pokrovsky debate and Stravinsky's "political incorrectness" ("the sparks may really fly"; The New York Times, 1 May 1994). In his review in The New York Times, Alex Ross commended the "grass-roots" approach in current Stravinsky studies cautioning against an indescriminate culturalpolitical analysis to the detriment of aesthetics. He did agree, however, that the careers of Stravinsky and Wagner invite such an analysis. Maya Pritsker of the Russian language daily, Novoe Russkoe Slovo, argued that for any educated Russian the theme of the festival was hardly new and by no means so sensational as it was presented in the west. Whatever is decided in the west, for her, Stravinsky had always been and always would be an absolutely Russian composer, the Pushkin of the twentieth century. After a half century of imbuing Igor Stravinsky with a cosmopolitan image, time has come to repatriate the composer and rehabilitate him in his homeland. Although he made a career of detached cosmopolitanism, he will be represented in the next century not as the European Stravinsky, a dandy forever reinventing himself (as his biographer, Robert Craft, described him), but as a composer who left his country in order to take control of a tradition, reinventing it aesthetically along the way. Indeed, he was simultaneously a Parisian neoclassic, a Hollywood serialist and an expatriate who had mastered Russian folk idiom to perfection. The truth of the matter is that Stravinsky's current reputation as arch-modernist composer and "Mr. 20th century himself" is no longer the definitive description that it might have been only a decade ago, a change that goes along with the redefinition of the Russian national tradition. As Stravinsky wrote in his Poetics of Music: "Far from implying the repetition of what has been, tradition presupposes the reality of what endures. It appears as a heirloom, a heritage that one receives on condition of making it bear fruit before passing it on to one's descendants" (quoted by Nancy Goldner, The Stravinsky Festival [1973]). Commenting on his compositional method, Stravinsky likened himself to an aesthetic kleptomaniac, who treated tradition as a matter of style not content, and who made everything he loved into his own; he set himself apart from the older generation of neonationalists of the Russian National school, particularly his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov. Like thousands of his contemporary compatriates, Stravinsky was unable to reconcile his origins with his aesthetics: "I am a double emigre, born to a minor musical tradition and twice transplanted into other minor ones" (quoted in Richard Taruskin, "Stravinsky and the Traditions," Opus [June 1984]).