Playing Detective with Stravinsky : PERFORMING ARTS: CLASSICAL MUSIC, DANCE, OPERA : By juxtaposing the composer’s ‘Les Noces’ with Russian folk music, the Pokrovsky Ensemble is bringing an international debate over the masterwork’s origins to Brentwood.

When the Pokrovsky Ensemble of Moscow performs its very unusual program of Russian wedding music and dance Thursday at the Veterans Wadsworth Theater, the event will dramatize for local audiences an international controversy over one of Igor Stravinsky’s most acclaimed masterworks, “Les Noces.”

Begun in 1914 and premiered nine years later (with choreography by Bronislava Nijinska) by the Diaghilev Ballets Russes, this cantata depicts a Russian peasant wedding using vocal soloists, a chorus, four pianos and percussion. Stravinsky always admitted that he assembled the text from books of wedding folklore but insisted that his music was another matter.

“I borrow nothing from folk pieces, with the exception of the theme of one factory song in the last tableau, which I repeat several times on different texts,” he wrote in “Chroniques de ma vie” in 1935. “All the other themes, motives and melodies are my own composition.”

Not so, says Russian conductor and musicologist Dmitri Pokrovsky, and he’s not alone. Robert Craft, the unquestioned authority on Stravinsky’s life and work, calls the composer’s assertion false. On Thursday night, the point will be underlined when the Pokrovsky Ensemble juxtaposes “Les Noces” with authentic village wedding music of the sort Stravinsky would have heard early in his life in southern and western Russia. The idea in the performance and in a related Elektra Nonesuch CD is to show the direct relationship between “Les Noces” and its folk roots.

“Stravinsky knew this material much better than he pretended,” Pokrovsky, 52, says on the phone from Moscow. Describing his group’s two decades of field research, he estimates that about 10 minutes of Stravinsky’s 23-minute score can be linked to existing folk songs. “Actually, we can trace other parts of ‘Les Noces’ to Georgian music and Russian Orthodox music,” Pokrovsky adds, “because it’s not only Russian [village] music he used.”

But performing source music for “Les Noces” alongside Stravinsky’s score is only the first of Pokrovsky’s surprises. He has also ventured daring alternatives to the usual performance practices that he says make his version of “Les Noces” newly authentic.

Consider his use of Yamaha Disklaviers (computer-driven player pianos) to obtain the “perfectly impersonal and perfectly mechanical” kind of playing that Stravinsky said he wanted. There’s also the matter of the radically retro singing style. As in the Russian folk songs the ensemble presents, the singing in “Les Noces” employs an earthy, open-throated timbre rather than the conventional classical sound heard in previous interpretations--including those conducted by Stravinsky himself.

“I believe that you cannot sing this music in any other way,” Pokrovsky says. “When Stravinsky wrote this piece and completed the vocal score, he was still in Russia and he was looking for a new timbre, a new kind of vocal music--just as he definitely created a new orchestral sound in ‘The Rite of Spring.’ But after the revolution, he didn’t have any opportunity to perform it this way.”

Citing the many kinds of professional singing other than academic opera-house vocalism Stravinsky heard growing up in St. Petersburg, Pokrovsky says that it’s wrong to impose “Italian or German singing-school” norms on a work “based on the authentic traditions of Russian villages.” The bottom line: Stravinsky was never happy with any performance of “Les Noces,” Pokrovsky says. But “I’m pretty sure he would approve [of mine].”

Not everyone agrees. Composer-conductor Lukas Foss says he likes the “sweet, natural, innocent quality” of the Pokrovsky “Noces,” and wouldn’t be surprised if Stravinsky would have “loved it, if he’d heard it. But it’s not what he had in mind. The score is based on folklore, but that doesn’t mean he wanted it sung in that style. That is a misunderstanding of performance practice: Composers don’t want to go back necessarily to the folk way of singing when they use folklore.”

Foss, who knew Stravinsky well beginning in the early 1950s, has conducted “Les Noces” himself a number of times and took part in a historic 1959 performance conducted by Stravinsky in which the pianists were himself, Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland and Roger Sessions. “It was an imitation of the original performance, which had four French composers at the piano,” he says.

Foss calls the debate about Stravinsky’s sources for “Les Noces” irrelevant: “We become composers because we love music, and it’s that love of the music that came before us that prompts our own composition,” he says. “So everything is influenced. The question is what do we do with the influence? That’s what we should concentrate on.”

And what about Stravinsky’s claim that he borrowed nothing in “Les Noces” from folk pieces? “Maybe he meant he didn’t literally quote folk elements,” Foss answers. “That it’s rooted in folk music is completely obvious, and I’m sure he didn’t want to discount that.”

“To make a big fuss about [this] is so self-serving on the part of those who make the fuss. Who cares? We should want to get to know the music better. This doesn’t help.”

Although there were Pokrovsky performances and related panels in Brooklyn two years ago (“A Sandblasting for Stravinsky” headlined the New York Times), California is arguably ground zero for the Stravinsky controversy--and not only because the composer lived in Los Angeles from 1940 to 1969, two years before his death. In April, the University of California Press will publish “Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions,” an exhaustive, two-volume study by Berkeley music professor Richard Taruskin.

Like Pokrovsky and Foss, Taruskin is fascinated by the transformation of folk material in “Les Noces,” calling the work “a masterpiece of pure perceptual form that transcended its own conceptual dependence on folkloric data to an extent unprecedented in the work of any Russian musician.” By this point in his life, Taruskin writes, “Stravinsky was no longer interested in folk songs as such, but only in stylistic abstractions from folklore.”

These insights may partly account for Stravinsky denying that he borrowed from folk pieces, but Taruskin offers another explanation. Call it musical politics: “As in so many other ways, Stravinsky was playing the Russian folk-music tradition against the art-music tradition, and using it as his passport to freedom from the academic postrealist milieu in which he had been reared,” he says.

That certainly sounds more like the wily Igor S. we know than a Stravinsky who forgot about his sources. Or wanted to distance himself from Russia after the revolution. Periodically reinventing himself throughout his life, Stravinsky created multiple myths not always subject to verification.

In fact, the ultimate comment on this musicological controversy may be a widely quoted statement made by Stravinsky himself in 1967: “A good composer does not imitate,” Stravinsky said. “He steals.”

*

POKROVSKY ENSEMBLE, performing “Les Noces” and Russian village wedding songs and dances, Veterans Wadsworth Theater, Veterans Administration grounds, Brentwood. Date: Thursday, 8 p.m. Price: $28.50-$31.50; $9 for UCLA students. Phone: (310) 825-2101, (213) 365-3500.