OK. So Stravinsky died 50 years ago this week. In my mind it's still college and he's barely been dead 30 years. For a 20th century composer more or less on the avant-garde, we know as much of Stravinsky as we know of anyone, but we don't know most of it. Some of it is less good than others, particularly as he aged (nobody can convince me that the Requiem Canticles are a return to form...), but there still are marvelous works that stay basically unknown and unheard: Persephone, The Nightingale, Apollo, Orpheus, Mavra, Concerto for Piano and Winds, King of the Stars, and as of just six years ago, the long lost Funeral Song... You owe it to yourselves to listen to them all.
But among the relatively unknown, the best work of all is Renard: the chamber opera burlesque that's as much a rough draft of his greatest work, Les Noces, as Kagemusha was for Kurosawa's Ran. It's nothing more than an 18 minute Aesopian Fable, complete with animals in costume. As Stravinsky always does at his best, he creates an hallucinatory ancient ritual enabled by collage, new use of instruments and instrumental combinations, new polytonal harmonies, and Russian folk song, and parodying traditional forms. What can one say? It's just another Stravinsky masterpiece for the stage, fully deserving to take its place as a stagework alongside Les Noces, Petrushka and Sacre and so much else.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VU4hgZF-9Q
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