CAROUSEL Chamber Music Ensemble (trio)

This concert bathes in jazz and the smells of wartime. The alienating version of the Marseillaise sets the martial atmosphere, and the closing elegy has you guessing the consequences. In the pieces in between them, it’s mainly ragtime that has the floor, often in company of other dances or flanked by long clarinet melodies. Rarely does the rag appear as a simple straightforward dance, because Stravinsky continually has the music going off balance. The metre stalls, accelerates, stumbles and trips. Over and over, the dance threatens to get stuck in its own devilish machinery. 

Ragtime and war almost become allies (albeit mainly allies in decay and disorder) in A Soldier’s Tale. And the rag is in Bernstein’s music as well. For those who only know the American composer’s musicals, the clarinet sonata will undoubtedly be a pleasant surprise: the young Bernstein turned out to be at least as Stravinskian as he was American.

"In view of the condition in which the world finds itself today, it would seem that now is the time for all existing governments to think, or at least to start to think, of possible and practical ways which will bring the people of the world together – in a “man-to-man” way – something greater than a “government-to-government”-way, and let all the people stand up and say wat they think about WAR." – Charles Ives (Letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1938)