Thing of the Day
Dominique Leone's birthday present to Stravinsky
June
20th 2011
Last
Friday was the birthday of Igor
Stravinsky... important? Oh yes - is there any more
influential composer from the last 100 years? Listen to The Rite Of Spring
and you'll hear the debt owed by pretty much every film composer, (did
John Williams really have to cough up money to the Stravinsky
foundation for Star Wars etc, or is that a myth?) and don't even get me
started on the way his freeing-up of rhythm put those ideas into
generations of avant-garde, progressive and math rock music
makers. It's probably taken getting on to 100 years for his
ideas to begin to become truly assimilated into rock and pop and
western music and everything. If you don't like 'classical
music', it might be because you've been listening to the cute, happy
stuff, the melodic equivalent of pop music (or you've tried the
hard-boiled, really atonal 20th century composers, which can be an
equal turn-off). Stravinsky's earlier work, with it's balance
of edgy tension, drive and hammering repetition and clear-cut, wild
melodies, is instantly understandable by those of us brought up on
rock... as could be seen by the numbers of longhairs and band members
turning up for the Rite at the Proms in recent years.
With this in mind, here's a free
download of a recording of Les Noces,
by San Francisco based musician/composer Dominique Leone.
This ballet has four parts, with an English language libretto, and the
download is an album's worth of music. It's not the most
well-known of Stravinsky's work, but with its
fabulous clear-cut complexity, thrilling rhythms and delicious harsh
beauty it's understandably growing in popularity.
The first version of Les
Noces (the Village Wedding) was completed in 1917, another
in 1919 which featured cimbaloms, pianola and harmonium in the
arrangement, and the ballet finally premiered in 1923. The
long gestation period seems to have been partly to do with Stravinsky's
attempts to use mechanical pianos at part of the orchestration... which
may be why Dominique Leone's rendition, using modern recording gizmos,
including treating his own voice to sing ALL the vocal parts, sound so
RIGHT. He's not re-arranged this, but kept as close as
possible to the original score. The result sounds stupendous,
spookily close to the wilder offering of Magma, Ruins, Koenjihyakkei
and the kicking the butts of all those avant-rock great-great-great
grandchildren.
Not content with just a recording, Dominique Leone, with musicians and
singers, will be performing Les
Noces at July 29 & 30 at the Maybeck House in
Berkeley, California.
"Dominique is a ”classically trained” musician from Texas who
currently operates out of 
San Francisco. He lists Brian Wilson,
Claude Debussy, Randy Newman, Paul McCartney, Andy Partridge, Glenn
Gould, ABBA, Miles Davis, Magma, and Olivier Messiaen as personal
heroes... All of his music could be considered ”pop” of a sort, though
usually with a dash of “prog”, “conceptual art” or “a really good tv
theme”. It’s catchy but ambitious; crafted but not sterile;
interesting but not pretentious."
www.dominiqueleone.com
wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_noces
The unfinished 1919 version was performed for the first time in the
Netherlands last year! www.svadebka.nl/English/svadebkaukhome.html
