Symphony in Three Movements

Program notes

About the Work

This symphony is a late change to the evening. When Joana Mallwitz had to cancel, her replacement, Dima Slobodeniouk, brought Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements in place of Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler: a swap between two works that were both written in the shadow of dictatorship and war.

Stravinsky composed it in the United States between 1942 and 1945, on a commission from the Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York, and conducted the New York Philharmonic in the premiere on 24 January 1946. It was his first major work written after he emigrated to America. Stravinsky rarely admitted that anything outside music had shaped his compositions, but he called this one his ‘war symphony’ and described it as a response to the Second World War: the first movement, he said, was prompted by a documentary about Japanese scorched-earth tactics in China, and the finale by footage of goose-stepping German soldiers and the Allies’ mounting success.

The symphony is also built from salvage. The prominent piano part of the first movement comes from a piano concerto Stravinsky had left unfinished, and the second movement, where the harp comes to the fore, reuses music he began in 1943 for the Hollywood film The Song of Bernadette, a score that in the end went to Alfred Newman. In the finale the two instruments meet on equal terms.

What to Listen For

The first movement bursts in with a violent upward rush and hammered chords, and much of it is driven by jagged, displaced rhythms that recall The Rite of Spring thirty years on. Listen for the piano, used less as a soloist than as a percussive member of the orchestra, snapping out its figures against strings and brass.

The second movement (Andante) is a sudden change of light: slender, almost courtly music with the harp to the fore, first written for the vision of the Virgin in The Song of Bernadette. Its poise is all the more striking between the two outer movements.

The finale (Con moto) brings the violence back. After a short interlude, marching figures and blaring brass evoke the war footage Stravinsky described, piano and harp now sharing the spotlight, and the symphony drives to an abrupt, emphatic close.