Early Stravinsky work rediscovered

An early orchestral work by Igor Stravinsky which was assumed lost for more than a century has been rediscovered.

Funeral Song, written by the 26-year-old composer as a tribute to his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov, will receive its first performance in 107 years in St Petersburg on 2 December. Valery Gergiev will conduct the Mariinsky Orchestra, with the concert filmed for television and streamed live by Medici.tv and Mezzo.

Funeral Song was first performed on 17 January 1909 at the first Russian Symphony Concert, with Felix Blumenfeld conducting Count Sheremetev’s orchestra at the Great Hall of the Conservatory.

The score for the 12-minute work for symphony orchestra disappeared in Russia during the Revolution, but Stravinsky remained intrigued about the piece in later years. He wrote in Memories and Commentaries that ‘the orchestral parts must have been preserved in one of the Saint Petersburg orchestral libraries; I wish someone in Leningrad would look for the parts, for I would be curious myself to see what I was composing just before The Firebird.’

The composer noted in The Chronicle of My Life that the concept behind the piece was that ‘all the solo instruments of the orchestra filed past the tomb of the master in succession, each laying down its melody as its wreath against a deep background of tremolo murmurings simulating the vibrations of bass voices singing in chorus.’

The orchestral parts were rediscovered thanks to musicologist Natalia Braginskaya and St Petersburg Rimsky-Korsakov State Conservatory librarian Irina Sidorenko. After the music department relocated its stock in spring 2015, a complete set of uncatalogued orchestral parts of Funeral Song was identified in a back room of the archive, where manuscripts had been made inaccessible for decades by the volume of scores stored in front of them.

The rediscovery was announced to the musical world by Dr. Braginskaya in September 2015 in a paper presented at an International Musicological Society conference in St Petersburg, in which she noted that ‘for variety of sonority and quantity of instruments only Fireworks, among Stravinsky’s early works, can compare with Funeral Song, still there is, for the sake of lightness, an absence of heavy brass.’ She describes the piece’s sound-world as a mixture of post-Wagnerian chromaticism with the harmonies of Rimsky-Korsakov.

Esa-Pekka Salonen will conduct the Philharmonia Orchestra in the UK premiere of the work on 19 February 2017. The performance will be recorded for broadcast on Radio 3 on 24 February 2017.

‘It’s a sensation to discover a new piece by Stravinsky, a work that we thought that was lost forever,’ Salonen said. ‘Stravinsky has been such a central part of life. To actually get my hands on a new score by him, of music I have never heard before, is incredibly exciting.’