SELECTIVE RETROSPECTIVE 
"He had also still not mastered the English language, in spite of having lived over twenty years in Hollywood with his second wife Vera and his American amanuensis, Robert Craft.
Some years later, after Stravinsky had died, Craft and Vera asked me to make a documentary profile to mark the centenary of Stravinsky’s birth in St Petersburg in 1882. We were incredibly lucky: we managed to reach Stravinsky’s three surviving children, the last two dancers alive who had actually performed in the notorious première of ‘The Rite of Spring’, Balanchine, Serge Lifar, Diaghilev’s secretary, Nijinsky’s daughter, Nicolas Nabokov, Rimsky-Korsakov’s granddaughter, and of course Mrs Stravinsky herself. Most of these first-hand witnesses were dead within a very few years. We had got there just in time.
“Can you imagine the situation”, Nicholas Nabokov, brother of the novelist Vladimir told me, “in 1917 when Stravinsky and his family had settled in Switzerland, having fled the Bolshevik Revolution, my friends and I were actually collecting money for the Stravinsky family to survive. And this was the man who had already written three international ‘best sellers’, ‘The Firebird’, ‘Petroushka’, and of course, ‘The Rite of Spring’. But because of the stupidity of first Tsarist Russia and then the Soviet Union, those works were not covered by copyright and Stravinsky never earned a penny from them. Can you imagine what he felt when he saw people like Ravel and Richard Strauss getting rich as a result of two or three works, and he Stravinsky having to struggle financially for most of his life?”
“The activity of composing is everything for me”, Stravinsky told me fiercely. “It is for that that I live. I like to compose music, much more than the music itself. I am at ease in the difficulties of composing, even the difficulties. But I can wait. I can wait as an insect can wait. I am somebody who is waiting, all my life”. Later, he told me: “I speak Russian. That you hear in my music. I am Russian”.
I was determined to record as much of his music as possible especially for the film, and this we did in Russia and London. Inevitably these are only extracts of complete works which, no doubt, offended the purists. Nonetheless, hearing Stravinsky’s music played full-blooded by a Russian orchestra is an experience I shall never forget, and this supplemented by the London Sinfonietta and Choir and the London Symphony Orchestra has provided, for me, some definitive performances of various key works.
The glittering yet overwhelmingly sad interpretation of part of the ‘Violin Concerto’, for instance, makes nonsense of Stravinsky’s assertion that “music can express nothing, only itself”. And to hear part of ‘Les Noces’ in a version that Stravinsky had had to abandon because he could not find any cimbalom players is a revelation, truly the sound of a Russian village band which is what he said he had wanted. Finally, a hair-raising and violent version of the ‘Sacrificial Dance’ from ‘The Rite of Spring’.
All of this, plus the voices of Théodore and Soulima, Stravinsky’s sons, plus his daughter Milène, Robert Craft, Balanchine, Cocteau, Madam Vera and Stravinsky himself - great music in some of the greatest performances you are ever likely to hear."
- Tony Palmer
Tickets £8
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