Classical music: A composer's progress

No musician of the 20th century is less in need of the special attention a festival confers than Igor Stravinsky. Nearly four decades after his death in 1971, his work -- above all, the three prismatic scores written for Sergei Diaghilev's Russian Ballet that made him a celebrity by 30 -- is played and recorded with unflagging regularity.

Few composers of the past 100 years have escaped his magnetism, particularly where rhythm is concerned. His absolutist aesthetic pronouncements -- the most notorious being "music can express nothing but itself" -- have been no less consequential. And through his decisive influence on modern performance style, with its pious deference to the notated text and its insistence on steady tempos and clarity of detail, he has contrived to make his presence felt even when his own music isn't on the bill.

Says the University of California's Richard Taruskin, dean of Stravinsky scholars: "Twentieth-century Euro-American musical culture has been created in the image of Stravinsky." Maybe so, but for many concertgoers, his music -- decidedly modern, yet not overly "difficult" -- is more admired than loved. Pervasiveness alone would justify this month's nine- concert, three-venue Stravinsky Festival, mounted by the Minnesota Orchestra and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra in their first joint undertaking since 2005. Encompassing three full programs and part of a fourth, the festival begins Friday with the bewitching "Apollo" (1928; aka "Apollon musagète"), played by the SPCO strings.

Stravinsky's sole opera

Two programs present both orchestras, either successively or, in the epoch-making "Rite of Spring" (1913), simultaneously. The remaining program -- arguably the festival highlight -- is devoted to a concert performance of "The Rake's Progress," the composer's only full-length opera (last heard here in a 1997 Minnesota Opera production), with an array of vocal soloists, the SPCO and the Minnesota Chorale.

Conducting duties are being shared by Minnesota Orchestra music director Osmo Vänskä (Jan. 22 and 24) and SPCO artistic partner Roberto Abbado (Jan. 21 and 23); "Rake's Progress" is in the hands of ex-Minnesota Orchestra music director and SPCO artistic partner-to-be Edo de Waart. (See schedule.)

Premiered in Venice on Sept. 11, 1951, "Rake's Progress" -- the culmination of Stravinsky's long neoclassic phase -- was coolly received. Inspired by the engravings of 18th-century artist William Hogarth, the opera tells a sobering tale, complete with Mephistopheles-like villain and jaunty, moralizing epilogue, that clashed with the mood of postwar Europe. In the era before supertitles, the allegorical, densely poetic libretto, by the eminent English poet W.H. Auden and his American companion Chester Kallman, was hard to follow, especially in Stravinsky's retro, oddly accented, allusion-filled musical setting. And the ending seemed distressingly ambiguous: Does love finally conquer all?

De Waart, who comes to the festival fresh from performances at the Metropolitan Opera of Strauss' "Der Rosenkavalier," acknowledges the peculiarities of Stravinsky's way with English: "When he lays the accent of a phrase completely differently than you would say it, I wonder, 'Did he do this on purpose, to set us on the wrong foot, to make this word less important or the next word more important? Or was he a Russian who had a beautiful English libretto of which he understood maybe 85 percent?' " Yet the Dutch conductor, reached at his home in Wisconsin, is emphatic about the virtues of the Auden and Kallman text: "It's so concise and precise about emotions, if sometimes in a roundabout way."

With so much Stravinsky on tap, it may be ungracious to dwell on what the festival neglects. But couldn't room have been found for at least one score ("Threni," perhaps, or the "Requiem Canticles") from his final, post-"Rake" period, when, in one of the most startling of musical self-reinventions, Stravinsky embraced the compositional methods of Arnold Schoenberg, often cast as his arch-rival, and of Schoenberg's pupil Anton von Webern? This late music, still unmistakably Stravinskyan, has languished too long; it deserves a festival of its own.