Stravinskyan

From its pounding, Stravinskyan opening, upper strings dancing so joyously, through the hieratic gestures of commanding horns, the Midsummer Marriage timbres of piano, harp and visionary solo strings, this was a confident, cogent account, Gardner attuning his orchestra perfectly to Tippett's idiosyncratic soundworld.

The fourth and final version of the "Daddy" melody, for cello solo (see example 13)--and the "brick wall" to which Bunita refers--is the culmination of the piece's penultimate section, made up of a wild, terrifying heterophony that quickly thickens to a devastating climax in which a single, simpering, falling chromatic violin line--described by Bunita as "the little voice, the voice of the victim, struggling to be heard"--finds itself suddenly and starkly pitted against a series of harsh down-bow eighth-note chords, played marcato and harmonized into a kind of Stravinskyan percussive noise.

Retaini ng such familiar strategies and devices as he unlearned the habits of his musical past enabled Stravinsky to negotiate his "second crisis" and to produce the unique yet still palpably Stravinskyan works of his late period.

Nevertheless, the path of decline traced in the `Grand choral', from near-quotation of its implied Lutheran model to what, in context, contrives to seem an incongruously Stravinskyan ostinato-like oscillation, offers clear parallels with Kielian-Gilbert's proposition, made apropos the proto-neo-Classical Concertino (1920), that `Stravinsky's [contradictions] speak in relation and in contradiction to the conventions of an implied design'.(46)

Brown sometimes reveals a well-remembering ear, as much more did Gabriel Jackson in the filmic pastoralism of In the Mendips, French-sounding episodes interspersed with Stravinskyan interpolations.