SALONEN: STRAVINSKY & OGONEK

Elizabeth Ogonek often finds inspiration for her compositions in poetry. One of her favorite poets is the late Polish writer Wisława Szymborska, who received the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. Szymborska’s poem “While Sleeping,” a contemplation of memory and forgetting written not long before her death, provided the impetus for Sleep & Unremembrance (2016). Much as the poem involves a collage of remembered images, Ogonek’s single-movement work came together not in chronological order but rather as a collection of fragmentary ideas that she finally molded into a unified whole. She sees her piece as “a reminder that behind every corner lurks mystery, surprise and change. Thus, the music twists and turns in search of its own memories and its true identity.”

Samuel Dushkin, who commissioned and premiered Igor Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto (1934), recalled that one day at lunch, Stravinsky “wrote down [a] chord and asked me if it could be played. I had never seen a chord with such an enormous stretch . . . and I said ‘No.’ Stravinsky replied sadly, ‘Quel dommage’ [What a pity].” When Dushkin went home and realized that it actually could be played, he immediately called the composer, who completed the concerto in six months. The chord that was so casually brought up at lunch begins each of the work’s four movements—Stravinsky called it his “passport” to the music.

The events of May 29, 1913—the premiere of Le Sacre du printemps (1913/1947) and the infamous audience riot that followed—catapulted Stravinsky, and modern music, onto a path from which there was no turning back. He described this controversial piece as a representation of pagan Russia, insisting that “it is unified by a single idea: the mystery and great surge of creative power of spring.” There are many connections to folk music, including a Lithuanian tune that is the basis of the incredibly famous, astonishingly difficult high-pitched bassoon solo that opens the piece.

After notes by James M. Keller and Michael Steinberg