Homage to Stravinsky

When the tiny old man walked onstage, moving crabwise around the pianos, the members of the audience at Manhattan's Town Hall rose in a spontaneous ovation. Igor Stravinsky turned to face them, ducked his head with a shy smile, the light tilting off his glasses. Then he stepped up on the podium to receive a different kind of ovation from four of the U.S.'s leading practitioners of his own art: Composers Lukas Foss, 37, Aaron Copland, 59, Roger Sessions, 62, Samuel Barber, 49. Seated at four grand pianos, two on each side of the stage, the four were assembled to play Stravinsky's choreographic cantata Les Noces (The Wedding)in ritual homage to the 77-year-old composer they all call their master.

There was a precedent for last week's unusual concert: at Stravinsky's own re quest, three pianist-composers had played the work at its premiere in Paris in 1923.* Last week's performance was one of a series of four planned by Columbia Records to display Stravinsky's music. The old man led his forces -- in addition to the pianos, four solo singers, a chorus and an assortment of percussion instruments --with a passion and vigor that left his audience breathless. Standing spiderlike on the podium, he raised clenched fists or clawed the air with splayed fingers, setting the hall alive with the violently percussive rhythms, the clipped vocal phrases, the primary colorations that once made his ritualistic evocation of a peasant wedding such a shocking piece of musical theater. But last week's audience had traveled a long way from the 1920s: its reaction was not one of shock but of reverence in the presence of an acknowledged masterwork.

The four participant composers were invited by Stravinsky to appear in the concert last summer. At first they all practiced individually; Foss, the only professional pianist in the group, worked for "only about five hours," but Sessions, who rarely performs in public, found that he had to "practice very hard." The four rehearsed with Stravinsky only three times. "He was," says Copland, "a little worried about us." But even Stravinsky was delighted with the way the performance went off, gave each composer a silver-framed, inscribed photograph as a memento. Why had the four interrupted their own busy schedules to undertake Les Noces? "Stravinsky," says Lukas Foss simply, "is a composer's composer."

* -Composers Francis Poulenc, Georges Auric, Vittorio Rieti and Pianist Marcelle Meyer.

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