Philadelphia Orchestra's Stravinsky concert

We don't often think of Igor Stravinsky the anthropologist, but perhaps we should. His works run the gamut of human religiosity from the most savage paganism (The Rite of Spring) to the most austere spirituality (the Mass). Stravinsky was a devout Christian, to be sure— at least after his return to his Orthodox roots in the mid-1920s— but he seems to have been on terms with many of the gods.

That's not a bad idea. Religious belief began in fear, and it's helpful to keep that edge. The Greeks had many gods, and you could always hope to play one off against another. Constantine, in embracing Christianity, didn't forsake his belief in Apollo.

Stravinsky, in making his own turn 16 centuries later, may have hedged his bets similarly. The first fruit of his newfound Christianity would be the Symphony of Psalms (1930), not only a musical masterpiece but also a formidable political and cultural statement, since at the time the Russian faith had been driven underground or into exile.

Yet this work had been preceded by two extraordinary meditations on Greek mythology and specifically on the figure of Apollo: Apollon musagète and Oedipus Rex. Was Stravinsky remembering to give the old gods their due, or at least not to forsake the hard-won wisdom they represented?

Rarely performed

Charles Dutoit put that question front and center by programming these latter works on this weekend's Philadelphia Orchestra concerts. He did so before, in 1992, and prior to that they'd been performed only once by the Orchestra, in programs separated by half a century: Stokowski introduced the Oedipus Rex to American audiences with the Philadelphians in 1931, and Riccardo Muti conducted Apollon musagète in 1982.

That isn't much of an airing for two of Stravinsky's finest mid-period scores— and, in the case of Oedipus Rex, one of the masterpieces of 20th-Century choral-cum-dramatic composition.

The two are very different works, linked only by a common reference to Apollo. Apollon musagete— Dutoit has restored Stravinksy's original title, "Apollo, Leader of the Muses," although it's now generally abbreviated as Apollo— is scored for strings alone. The muses in question— respectively of poetry, mime, and dance— are those of the ballet, and in returning to ballet for the first time since The Rite of Spring Stravinsky was clearly interrogating the origins of the form itself.

Dance in an unruly universe

Dance— disciplined measure— springs from a primitive root, as The Rite of Spring had made clear; but it also represents the imposition of order on an unruly universe. Nietzsche had suggested that the Greeks had separated and then integrated these elements of dance (and divinity) in their culture, with Apollo representing procession and joyful order. Stravinsky treats him this way, beginning his scenario with the god's luminous birth (a wonderful, shimmering passage), continuing with the emergence of the muses, and concluding with their apotheosis.

The music, for which Stravinsky reached back to modal harmonies as far removed from the jagged rhythms and dissonance of The Rite as possible, is of a surpassing loveliness, projecting a timeless quality that— as with all great art— makes us forget its novelty and originality. Stravinsky had never done anything like this before, nor had anyone else.

You might find an antecedent in Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings; Tchaikovsky was very much on Stravinsky's mind at the time, and he would soon work Tchaikovsky's tunes into The Fairy's Kiss. There's a nod toward Ravel, Stravinsky's chief musical rival in the Paris of the 1920s, and even a whiff of the boulevardier at one point.

Gluck, too, is a clear precursor. But the material in Apollon is entirely Stravinsky's, as are the limpid textures that would thereafter become the hallmark of his neoclassical style.

Unleashing the strings

The opportunity to hear the orchestra's string section on its own— Stravinsky was to write for strings alone only once again, in his Concerto in D of 1946— was a distinct pleasure as well. The Philadelphians no longer feature the plush string sound of the Ormandy era, though they can summon it when necessary. Here, however, they were called upon to project deftness and transparency, and they did so splendidly.

Dutoit's reading was a bit too restrained, however. There is sharper accent and greater dynamism to this music than he sometimes brought out.

A more sinister Oedipus

If the deity of Apollon musagète is "Apollonian" in the Nietzschean sense— a god of stately dance and balanced proportion— the Apollo of Oedipus Rex is an altogether more sinister figure. For this "opera-oratorio," as he called it, Stravinsky went back again to Gluckian convention, pitting the protagonists of a Sophoclean drama (in a redaction by Jean Cocteau) against a massed male chorus.

The orchestral textures are again spare, although in the dramatic climaxes they rise to a furious tutti, and these in turn play off vocal lines that are sometimes sinuous, sometimes declamatory.

Stravinsky said he wanted to get at the essence of the story, which is that of a man trapped in a snare that gradually becomes apparent to everyone but himself. Oedipus sins without actually committing deliberate wrong, since his conduct is rational and his intentions are pure. True, he is a man much taken with himself— he repeatedly refers to himself, in the third person, as "illustrious"— but if this is the sort of hubris that traditionally attracts the ire of the gods, it's not what he's punished for.

Rather, Oedipus suffers the consequences of acts he can't control, and which actually constitute not merely appropriate but heroic behavior. He deserves honor and instead reaps disgrace. The gods (Apollo chief among them) make him a cynosure, with no intent that he should serve as a moral exemplum.

Detached narrator

Stravinsky and Cocteau don't seem to have much pity for Oedipus either. Stravinsky's driving rhythms and stabbing harmonies hurry the hero along to his fate, and Cocteau's narrator (a spoken, not a vocal role) seems briskly detached. Do they share the god's cruel perspective? But in Sophoclean drama, there is none other; Oedipus is a fated figure, and does not have a point of view.

Only at the end, as Oedipus is led blind to the gates of Thebes, does the chorus bid him a tender and compassionate farewell, for the first time speaking in the first person ("I loved you, Oedipus"). In this lament, it rejects the view of Oedipus as either villain or scapegoat, and though it affirms its "pity" for him, it restores him at the same time to heroic stature. This posture, as composer and librettist seem to suggest, is the only resistance one can offer to the gods who impose their will on humanity as they wish.

Ransacking tradition

The music of Oedipus Rex is a clamor of disparate styles, put together, as Stravinsky himself said, "from whatever came to hand." Unlike Apollon musagète (which immediately succeeded it), Oedipus Rex makes no attempt to achieve unity of mood or to suggest the archaic. Rather, this score is busy, bustling, modern and opportunistic in the sense of T. S. Eliot, who like Stravinsky ransacked tradition and yet achieved a wholly distinctive tone. Oedipus Rex puts plenty of emphasis on winds, brass and percussion, but the textures remain clear and emphatic. The result is undeniably a masterpiece— one of the signature scores of musical modernism and one of the great choral works of the 20th Century.

Dutoit led an assured and often crackling performance. Among the soloists, tenor Paul Groves was particularly fine as Oedipus, and the men of the Philadelphia Singers Chorale were suitably weighty and troubled as the Greek Chorus— a single dramatic role distributed among dozens of voices.

A 1920s snapshot

This concert was a snapshot of Stravinsky in the late 1920s, moving searchingly from style to style in what we now rather too glibly think of as the long neoclassical afternoon of his career, restlessly experimental and no less modern, no less surprising than he had been a decade and a half before in Petrushka and The Rite of Spring. What one sees, at this distance, is a man reinventing himself in the ruins of a postwar civilization desperately trying to resurrect itself, but headed, like Oedipus, only toward new and greater disaster.

Did Stravinsky foresee that? It must have been in everyone's bones. But only a great artist could give it such disturbing and prophetic expression.

An unsettling departure

Meanwhile, this week's concert program brought us the same "Dear Valued Patrons" letter from Richard Worley and Allison Vulgamore announcing the Orchestra's bankruptcy filing, and the Inquirer brought confirmation of the departure of principal clarinetist Ricardo Morales for the presumably greener pastures of the New York Philharmonic. A rather thin house filed out onto a Broad Street littered by the debris of Philadelphia's faux-festival carnival.

I saw a different kind of decay here: a city trying to jolly itself in the midst of a grim depression (someone needs to call it by its right name) while failing to properly manage or support its core cultural institution. At least there was bravery and integrity in the Orchestra itself. But we need much more than that.