Duo Concertant

Cantilène

Eclogue I

Eclogue II

Gigue

Dithyrambe

Many composers have found it difficult to reconcile themselves to the sound of piano and strings but most of them - by means as different as those adopted by, say, Tchaikovsky, Bartók or Ravel - have succeeded in the end. Stravinsky confessed that for many years he “took no pleasure in the blend of strings struck in the piano with strings set in vibration with the bow” and yet within two years of writing his Violin Concerto in D he had completed the Duo Concertant and, among other arrangements for violin and piano, the Divertimento and the Suite Italienne.

What reconciled Stravinsky to the violin-and-piano situation was his admiration for Samuel Dushkin, the violinist for whom he had written the Violin Concerto in D in 1931, and his interest in prolonging their collaboration - not to mention his interest in the relatively easy business of setting up recital tours rather than concerto performances. The Duo Concertant, which was written at Voreppe (near Grenoble) in 1932, became the core item in the Dushkin-Stravinsky duo repertoire. The only Stravinsky score conceived originally for violin and piano, it is of sonata stature but firmly evasive of all sonata implications. At this Apollonian stage in his development Stravinsky had no ambition to associate his music with the classical and romantic sonata tradition; he was concerned more, he said, with emulating “the pastoral poets of antiquity and their scholarly art and technique.”

While that no doubt explains the Eclogue title attached to the second and third movements, it sheds little light on the thinking behind the opening Cantilène, which seems to be intent above all on setting out the fundamental differences between the violin and the piano. Certainly, the piano is treated throughout as a percussion instrument whereas the violin, except in the fanfare-like opening bars and their reprise at the end, sustains a broad melodic line for the most part accompanying itself in double-stopped harmonies. There is a distinctly pastoral element in the first Eclogue although, with its bagpipe sonorities at the beginning and its echoes of the home-made fiddle music of The Soldier’s Tale, its inspiration is surely rather more primitive than that of the eclogues of Theocritus or Virgil. The second Eclogue, on the other hand, is a thoroughly sophisticated equivalent of the controlled lyricism Stravinsky so much admired in his antique pastoral poets - and no less so for its resemblance to the Bach-like second Aria in the Violin Concerto in D.

Violin and piano are more closely associated in the baroque-inspired Gigue where the violin part, with its dry staccato bowing and deftly integrated pizzicatos, is scarcely less percussive than the piano part. While the final Dithyrambe also derives something of its character from J.S. Bach, its Bacchic rather than Apollonian title seems to confirm that here at least the melodic material is developed according to instinct rather than classical poetics.