Stravinsky, or known by many in my country- Sharlunia- “Igor the Great”, wasn’t a virtuoso pianist, though his main instrument was the piano. He didn’t write many exclusive pieces for the piano, but his transcription of three movements of his ballet music, Petrushka, for the piano made these three short pieces of the most difficult pieces for the instrument. Since then –late 1920-, these three pieces where challenged by virtuoso pianists to show their brilliant technique.
Maurizio Pollini, known as many as the best living pianist of the world, has played these pieces in a wonderful way. I’ve chosen the last movement of these three, Shrovetide. I’ve also included the scores, so that you can look at them as the music goes on. Honestly I couldn’t even play the first measure properly!
Files size: music in .wma format:6,246,069 bytes
score in .pdf format:1,657,182 bytes

This post isn’t a normal one. In some ways, it isn’t a post for Musicolunia. Maybe I should have written it in Englunia or my Persian weblog, 5th Movemement. Anyhow… I feel a little strange. I have a Danish friend, Elora, whom I found her exactly because of that Muhammad cartoons. She’s such a lovely person, I like her characteristics, being really open minded and one thing I like a lot, (as it appears to me, and in a way I like) being crazy!
Her father had cancer, and he died tonight. I knew that would come sooner or later, but this feeling is a strange one. I haven’t seen her. We’re kilometers away from each other. We are of two different cultures, and yet I regret for the way she feels now.
This post’s music is exclusively for Elora. It’s from Stravinsky’s Fire Bird suite, the last part, Final Hymn. And from the 1945 version, conducted by the composer himself.
Stravinsky wasn’t a great conductor, but he was able to make orchestra play what he wanted his music sound like. So his recordings of his works are the exact way he wanted them to be performed.
Fire bird suite, a very revolutionary work, was the first of ballets which made Stravinsky a famous and leading composer. The original version was written in 1910 and he made two revisions in 1919 and 1945. I’m not going to write much about the piece in this post, as it needs a more complete series of posts.
Anyway, in my imagination, the Final Hymn is Hope. It may not be that one Stravinsky thought of for the ballet scene, but I like to think of it in that way. Small sparkles of hope shines, and then strengthen. They grow and get stronger and stronger, but suddenly fogs of uncertainty and indeterminacy come and fill the whole atmosphere, but at last the light comes out even stronger and hope wins the battle!
That’s it, Stravinsky’s Fire Bird, Final Hymn, 1945 version, as performed by Columbia Symphony Orchestra conducted by the composer… for dear Elora.

I tried a lot to have more visitors for this weblog, especially for the Farsi version. Unfortunately classical music doesn’t have many audiences in my homeland, and so I didn’t succeed.

I don’t want to nag or anything like that, just to tell you that I won’t update this weblog anymore. I had in mind to give more attention to 20^th century music. As I won’t reach 20^th century composers, for example in our concerto’s series, just for a beautiful goodbye, I’ve chosen a Russian Song from my favorite composer, Igor Stravinsky. The fourth and last of these russian songs, Tilim-Bom.

Hope you’ll enjoy it,

Bye :)

Igor Stravinsky has one very particular distinguishing characteristic which can hardly be found in any other not even composer, but artist. He has composed in many different styles and totally different kinds of music. Though he’s most famous for his early pieces which are categorized as polyphonic modern classical music, but his works expand from Baroque to serialism and even Jazz and rag music!
Here you can to his Italian Suite, no. 3 for Cello and the Piano as played by Laffranchini and Rebaudengo. Even in this Baroque style piece you can hear his very brilliant innovations. I like this piece a lot, especially those parts the music changes in a very special way kill me!!