Igor Stravinsky is the Picasso of classical music such as the Spanish cubist put the laws of perspective and anatomy upside, so stuck and cut the small Russian music are together as if it were a movie montage. As a musical magpie he stole musical styles from past and present (De Machaut, Bach, Pergolesi, Tchaikovsky, Webern, Russian Orthodox church music, ragtime, tango). With great sense of
… understatement were dismantled and restructured these styles so that they sounded unmistakably like Stravinsky. Stravinsky broke in Paris by the ballets The Firebird, Pétrouchka and Le Sacre du Printemps. The first performance of the last-mentioned ballet (1913) belongs to the most memorable scandals in music. With the ritual power of Les Noces (1914-1923), and the sardonic irony of Histoire du Soldat (1918) Stravinsky developed a modern, anti-romantic style, which has been a major influence on Dutch composers such as Louis Andriessen, Otto Ketting, Klaas de Vries and Daan Manneke. (HJ)more
