Concerto in E flat

for chamber orchestra (“Dumbarton Oaks 8-V-38”)

Tempo giusto

Allegretto

Con moto

“Dumbarton Oaks,” as Stravinsky’s Concerto in E flat for chamber orchestra is more familiarly known, has nothing to do with Dumbarton in the West of Scotland. It is actually associated with Dumbarton Oaks in Washington DC, the home of the art patrons Mr and Mrs Robert Woods Bliss who commissioned the work and who had it first performed there in celebration of their thirtieth wedding anniversary on 8 May 1938. The score has another, more intimate association with the Bliss house in that the gardens around it, which the composer had particularly admired when he visited Dumbarton Oaks in 1937, had some influence on its formal layout.

For Stravinsky at that time, devoted as he was to the neo-classical aesthetic, well proportioned design was at least as important as anything else. The Concerto in E flat is so conscientiously structured, in fact, that it looks almost as if the durations - not only of the larger sections but also of the shortest bars within them - were determined first and the actual musical material filled in later. It is not, on the other hand, the dry work that might have been produced by a drawing-board process of this kind. Stravinsky kept his emotions strictly to himself, it is true, but he put no inhibitions at all on his virtuoso delight in entertaining the ear. Finding something of his inspiration in Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, he treats each of his fifteen instrumentalists as a soloist - although, obviously, some are more prominently featured than others - while setting them off against each other in ingeniously calculated contrapuntal textures and intriguingly asymmetrical rhythmic relationships. Contrasting textures, where the interest is harmonic rather than contrapuntal or rhythmic, are confined largely to a few bars of transition between the three movements, which follow each other without a break.

The concerto grosso precedence of “Dumbarton Oaks” is most apparent in the first movement, where the brightly scored opening theme functions as a ritornello between well defined episodes including, at the centre of gravity of the construction, an extended and elaborate fugal passage. Compensation for the daringly under-dressed outer sections of the Allegretto is found in their melodic charm, the decorative facility of the flute and the comparatively indulgent string scoring in the middle section. There is no baroque precedent for the Con moto last movement, where a march theme develops and gathers momentum without, paradoxically, proceeding in a conventional march rhythm for more than a few bars at once.