When a 28-year-old Igor Stravinsky was hired to score The Firebird, no one expected the debut to launch the career of one of the most relevant figures in music history. The Firebird Suite as a standalone composition has achieved status as one of the greatest musical masterpieces.
The libretto of The Firebird derives from two Russian folktales: of Firebird and of Koschei the Deathless. Koschei personifies the destructive power in East Slavic folklore. The Firebird mirrors Greek Prometheus and denotes fire’s dual power to destroy and create.
Emilia Hoving, the conductor of the Malmö Symphony Orchestra’s Firebird concerts, presents the 1919 version of the suite in a maverick companion of two modern pieces. The musical triptych begins with the Cello Concert by Esa-Pekka Salonen, with Senja Rummukainen as the soloist. The atonal, experimental sounds of the first installment did not instantly strike me as a natural introduction to The Firebird.
Senja Rummukainen explores the percussive nature of each instrument. The performance was chaotic and lively, to the point that Emilia Hoving began dancing on her conductor’s podium. The recurring sweeping glissandos on Senja Rummukainen’s cello produced an almost out-of-tune sound, and the repeated fermatas created an illusion of a skewed sense of time.
The middle piece, Songs of the Ice by Outi Tarkiainen, stood in straightforward contrast to the upcoming Firebird Suite. The illustrative character of the piece plays with the different natures of ice, from the violent resonance of the falling ice, to the hollow, swooshing texture of the snow.
The interplay between noise and murmur, contrasting between the harsh and soft qualities of ice created a fully immersive, interactive experience. The Songs of the Ice eventually deadened to nothingness and laid the ground for the climax of the evening.
The elegant sounds of Stravinsky’s The Firebird immediately woke me up from the infatuation with the garbled texture of the two preceding modern compositions. Stravinsky, one of the most important representatives of modernism in music, balances between the debris of romanticism and the birth of avant-garde music. Harmonic play is one of the common threads between the three performed compositions.
The cello concert first tests the limits of atonality, the Songs of the Ice then introduces the interdependence between tonality and evocativeness of music, and The Firebird Suite uses harmony to achieve specific storytelling and emotional effects. Stravinsky uses harmonic leitmotifs, ascribing diatonic harmony to positive characters and chromatic harmony to the negative figures in The Firebird.
This performance of The Firebird Suite was simply beautiful, especially the subtle yet clear solo of the french horn. The themes moved seamlessly between the voices. The Firebird already shows Stravinsky’s unique voice, which fully emerges in The Rite of Spring three years later. Stravinsky treated all of his early atonal experiments with due attention, often using repetition. He uses what I would call a musical stream of consciousness, allowing the melody, overcharged with emotion, to take over.
Hoving’s orchestra beautifully portrayed the play of contrasts between the polar nature of fire, illustrating the rapid spread of flames with sprawling crescendos, and the flickering sparks with a delicate humming of the instruments. Emilia Hoving managed to soften Stravinsky’s harsh writing and created a fluid movement of sound within and throughout the three installments. The concert ended with a standing ovation and I was not late to join in.
Now, in such geopolitically turbulent times, the symbolism behind the Firebird remains ever so important. The dual nature of fire reminds us that the same powers that destroy life can also create it.
