Word: firebird
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Artur Rodzinski (Sot. 10 p. m. NBC-Blue) conducts the NBC Symphony in Michael Leonidovitch Starokadomsky's Concerto for Orchestra, Glinka's Overture to Russian and Ludmilla, Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony, Stravinsky's Firebird suite...
...were officially presented as Art. In the pit an all-Negro "symphony" orchestra, sporting a single saxophone as a concession to racial idiom, played lukewarm jazz, the Star-Spangled Banner and Bach's Air for the G String. The evening's most pretentious item, Stravinsky's Firebird Suite, was played on a phonograph...
...overnight celebrity in Russia when he wrote Fireworks as a wedding present for Rimsky-Korsakov's daughter. Diaghilev commissioned him in 1910 to compose for the Russian Ballet. In the next few years Stravinsky's name sped across Europe as the author of the blazing, polyphonic Firebird and the riotous Petrouchka. The harsh, neolithic percussions of Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps were less welcome, made first-nighters in Paris hiss and jeer. Stravinsky unconcernedly went his way. Suddenly he announced he was through with picture-music and would "return to Bach." His style grew clearer, if more...
...Rimsky's daughter's wedding Stravinsky wrote Fen d' Artifice, a fantasy so colorful that Sergei Diaghilev promptly commissioned him to write for the Russian Ballet. Fame came quickly with The Firebird (1910), Petrouchka (1911) and Le Sacre du Printemps (1913) which caused such a furor at the Paris premiere that the dancers, unable to hear the music, followed the beat of the frenzied Vaslav Nijinsky, shouting to them from the wings while Stravinsky kept a tight grip on the dancer's coat collar. Of Nijinsky, now interned in a Swiss insane asylum, Stravinsky writes...
...most critics Stravinsky was most inspired during the four Paris years that followed. His Firebird was a blaze of color, marvelously decorative in every detail. Year later came Petroitchka, with Nijinsky enacting the poor sawdust puppet who briefly had a soul. In that exuberant work woodwinds ran riot and to many they seemed altogether tuneless...