Igor Stravinsky

Together with Dmitri Shostakovich and Serge Prokofiev, Igor Stravinsky takes his place in the great tradition of Russian composers that began with Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, and Mussorgsky. He was born into a musical family (his father was a famous opera singer) and studied music privately – by far his most influential teacher was Rimsky-Korsakov, who not only encouraged him musically but acted as something of a father figure following his own father's death in 1902. His earliest compositions are notable for their solid craftsmanship, but it is in his Scherzo fantastique and Fireworks that we first hear his highly distinctive voice and discover his remarkable gifts as an orchestrator. When Diaghilev heard these works in 1909, he was sufficiently impressed to commission The Firebird, the first performance of which in Paris in 1910 made its composer an overnight celebrity. With Petrushka and, above all, The Rite of Spring, celebrity turned to notoriety. In parallel with his activities as a composer, Stravinsky continued to travel the world as a virtuoso pianist and conductor. In a series of neoclassical works beginning in 1918, he sought inspiration in the music of the past, reinventing its musical language in works such as Pulcinella, Oedipus rex, Apollon musagète and The Rake's Progress. In a final change of direction, he adopted Schoenberg's serial technique, with the result that the works that he wrote between 1952 and 1971 were among the most modern and dissonant of his entire career.