Run Time: Approx. 8 minutes

Of the three composers on this program, Igor Stravinsky is likely the most well-known. For many, the name immediately conjures monumental works like The Firebird or The Rite of Spring. These have undoubtedly become his greatest hits, thanks in no small part to Disney’s Fantasia and Fantasia 2000, but these large-scale works represent only a sliver of a career defined by reinvention. Over the course of his life, Stravinsky’s output moved through several clearly defined phases. There was his early Russian primitivist and avant-garde period, his Neoclassical phase, and later an interest in twelve-tone serialism, each marking a distinct shift in his musical voice.

The Eight Instrumental Miniatures were originally written as easy piano exercises for students entitled The Five Fingers. The melody of each movement, played in the right hand, is made up of only five notes, so the player never needs to shift their hand position. The original left-hand accompaniment was very simple, usually limited to one or two notes at a time, providing basic harmonic support. The simple pieces offer a glimpse of Stravinsky at his most whimsical and understated, and the composer was clearly quite proud of them; he played them on his very first recording in 1925. However, when he returned to the work and orchestrated it in 1962, he was a very different composer. He had recently returned to Russia for the first time in nearly 50 years, and his style had undergone several significant evolutions in the interceding years. The orchestration, with its added voices and harmonies, offers a greater breadth of color and style, and flashes of his various explorations and reinventions shine through the texture.

While Eight Instrumental Miniatures retains the charm and playfulness of The Five Fingers, the choice of instruments and the way they are employed bring out aspects of Stravinsky’s more avant-garde periods. Perhaps most strikingly, he chooses an exceedingly odd collection of instruments: pairs of winds, one horn, and three pairs of strings. At times, this unusual voicing hints at his Russian primitivist voice. For instance, in the third movement, the tessitura of the horn sits higher than the flute and clarinet, resulting in a wailing quality not unlike the opening of The Rite of Spring. The angular, surprising rhythms in the final movement, too, sound more jarring and avant-garde when voiced by winds than in the solo piano version.