Eight Instrumental Miniatures

Tempo di marcia

Larghetto

Tempo di tango

Stravinsky was a master of the art of recycling. Music written for one purpose he would often use again, perhaps decades later, for another purpose – sometimes improving on the original and always making the new arrangement sound as if the material were conceived for it in the first place. The Eight Instrumental Miniatures are a particularly interesting example. Written in 1921 in Coco Chanel’s villa outside Paris and first published under the title Les cinq doigts (Five Fingers), the original version is a collection of “eight very easy tunes on five notes for piano.” Only an exceptionally perceptive listener could guess, however, that the Eight Instrumental Miniatures written 41 years later for Lawrence Morton, director of the Monday Evening Concerts in Hollywood, derive from such a humble source with such severe technical restrictions.

Scoring the arrangement for 15 instruments –    two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons, one horn, and two each of violins, violas and cellos – Stravinsky had far more scope for variety in colour and texture. He could now develop the piano pieces not only by means of “rhythmic rewriting and phrase regrouping,” as he described it, but also through “canonic elaboration and new modulations.” The canonic treatment of the expressive oboe melody on its recall in the opening Andantino is only the first example of how effectively, though discreetly, the five-finger originals are enriched here. Curiously grumpy in the piano version, the Russian-flavoured Lento third movement sounds rather brighter in its new colours. Both the Allegretto fourth and the Tempo di marcia fifth benefit from being slightly longer. The relationship between the Larghetto seventh and the Serenata of the recently completed Pulcinella, both pieces in siciliano rhythm, is all the clearer in the present version, while the concluding Tempo di tango sounds more, if not much more, like a tango.

Gerald Larner 2010