Stravinsky: Divertimento (transcription for violin & piano by Stravinsky & Samuel Dushkin from Le Baiser de la Fée)

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Stravinsky’s collaboration with the violinist Samuel Dushkin was a great artistic success, generating new works for the repertoire as well as arrangements of some of the composer’s most tuneful and popular works. Of these arrangements, Dushkin wrote that Stravinsky seemed ‘to go back to the essence of the music and rewrite or recreate the music in the spirit of the new instrument’. Reviewing the current performers in The Independent, Bayan Northcott writes that ‘these are no ordinary transcriptions. In reducing items from The Firebird or The Fairy’s Kiss to the violin and piano medium, Stravinsky rethought and respaced their every chord’.

In the performing partnership of Anthony Marwood and Thomas Adès, Hyperion has a combination that seems to reignite the original flames of inspiration, creation and re-creation.

Stravinsky’s music for violin and piano was written for his duo with violinist Samuel Dushkin. Both the Suite italienne and Divertimento are arrangements of ballet scores, each work in turn an alchemic transformation of Baroque and Romantic styles into Stravinsky’s distinctive idiom. The enigmatic but unwaveringly expressive Duo Concertant was Stravinsky’s only original work in this form. Huebl and Wait were acclaimed for their recording of Schnittke’s complete Sonatas (8570978). Mark Wait received two GRAMMY® nominations for his disc of Elliott Carter’s Piano Concerto (8559151).

The 'Divertimento' for violin and piano by Igor Stravinsky, written in 1932 as an arrangement of his ballet 'Le Baiser de la Fée', and the sonata for violin and piano by Dmitri Shostakovich, composed in 1968 on the occasion of David Oistrakh’s 60th birthday, could hardly be more disparate: Stravinsky’s work is a spirited homage to Tchaikovsky, based on songs and piano pieces by that composer, whereas the Shostakovich is a profound and mysterious contribution to the genre of the violin sonata. Both works, however, share a preference for an allegorical and deeply mysterious idiom and symbolism which, in Stravinsky’s case, results in brilliant, but also cool, “music on music”, whereas Shostakovich’s piece appears as a form of internal biography. For interpreters performing both pieces for one disc or in the same concert, one of the main challenges and attractions of this combination lies in tracing the cultural, musical and political experiences and values shared by both composers. In this performance, Judith Ingolfsson and Vladimir Stoupel have accomplished that task with mastery.

The title is something of a charming misnomer: only a few minutes of Igor Stravinsky’s all-encompassing output were originally scored for violin and piano. However, once he had made the acquaintance of the violinist Samuel Dushkin, his interest in this most Classical of chamber genres was piqued, and the two men worked closely to transform some of his most popular, melodic and balletic music into suites and miniatures that are no mere transcriptions but stand, witty and proud, in their own right.

Dushkin was suggested to Stravinsky as a possible performer for the premiere of his Violin Concerto. Stravinsky acceded, and found Dushkin to have ‘a musical culture, a delicate understanding, and – in the exercise of his profession – an abnegation that is very rare’ – qualities also to be appreciated in the deft approach of the Dutch violinist Isabelle van Keulen, complemented by the famously quirky originality of her partner here, the Finnish pianist Olli Mustonen.

Rising star of the violin Ray Chen, winner of the Queen Elizabeth International Music Competition, makes his recording debut with Melba, accompanied by another fast-emerging Australian talent, pianist Timothy Young. Diversions is a disc of scintillating chamber music that presents Igor Stravinsky at his most entertaining, his spirit brimming with optimism and bravura.

The pieces – Suite after themes, fragments and pieces by Giambattista Pergolesi, Duo concertante, Divertimento, ‘Russian Maiden’s Song’ from the opera Mavra and the ‘Danse russe’ from Petrushka – are perfect vehicles to showcase Chen’s violinistic bel canto, his luminous tone and his off-the-scale technique, all to be expected given his competition pedigree. But Stravinsky’s music also provides Chen with the perfect vehicle to demonstrate his genius for vivid musical story-telling. This recording marks Chen as an exciting musical personality as well as a remarkable virtuoso.

Ray Chen was born in Taiwan in 1989 and raised in Brisbane, Australia where he began playing violin within the Suzuki school. He was accepted to the Curtis Institute of Music at the age of 15, where he continues to work on expanding his repertoire with Aaron Rosand (himself a student of the great Efrem Zimbalist who was in turn a student of Leopold Auer.) Chen is the winner of the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Belgium (2009) and the Yehudi Menuhin Competition in Cardiff (2008). He has recently signed an exclusive recording contract with Sony.

Vadim Repin plays the magnificent Stradivarius “Ruby” (1708) by kind permission of the Stradivarius Society of Chicago.