After four years of correspondence between the two, Robert Craft managed to meet his idol personally, who opened wide the doors of his intimacy, so he ended up becoming the closest thing to the shadow of Igor Stravinsky: he spoke for him, wrote for him, directed for him, perhaps even thought for him. He was his amanuense, his secretary, his spokesman, his medium, his squire, the jealous guardian of his privacy, and, with sincere conviction and enthusiasm, also the presumably most authoritative interpreter of his music, the only one with unlimited access to the master's interiorities. Craft, who died in 2015 in Florida, a far cry from his native New York, outlived his putative father, his protector, his doppelgänger by more than 40 years.
More informationIgor Stravinsky, the musician of a thousand faces
On July 5, 1950, again after a previous exchange of letters, Craft rang the doorbell of the house of Arnold Schönberg, neighbor of Igor Stravinsky for 11 years in Los Angeles, although we have as little evidence of a possible relationship between them as of the, apparently, also nonexistent between Beethoven and Schubert in the Vienna of the early nineteenth century. The author of Moses und Aronthen had only one year and one week to live. The master and apprentice listened together to a recording of Pierrot lunaire, his song cycle on "three times seven poems by Albert Giraud" and Craft then recalled "the intensity of man and his power of concentration while listening to the music" and how this "charged the atmosphere to an almost unbearable extreme". He also confesses that at that time he "revered him more than anyone else in the world": yes, above even Stravinsky, with whom he already lived and whom he considered part of his "family". This young man full of talent and ambition born in the New World had managed to make his way to the two great totems of European musical modernity: one, a survivor of old Russia and a virtuoso of reinvention, transformism and ventriloquism; the other, a Jew exiled from old Vienna, fiercely faithful to his principles and convinced until the last day of his messianic destiny.
In the golden age of disco, when there were means, money and will so that the best musicians could bequeath to the world imperishable documents that faithfully collected their interpretations, the always astute Craft found that the music that interested him most, the one that had as spearheads precisely Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schönberg, was the one that nobody recorded. Resolute as he was, and with the close bond that united him to Stravinsky as a master key that could open any door, Craft began in the early fifties to record in the studio (in many cases, as authentic firsts), systematically, the compositions of Schönberg and his disciple Anton Webern, the master of extreme conciseness and the direct inspirer of the cultivators of integral serialism, The avant-garde current then more in vogue. Years later, Craft would also end up in the more expansive and less cryptic works of Alban Berg, the other great offshoot of the Schönberguian tree, of which you can hear here, among others, magnificent versions of the Three Pieces for Orchestra, the Chamber Concerto or the three orchestrated movements of the Lyric Suite.
As Stravinsky maintained an assiduous relationship with the Columbia label, and Craft had an essential role in the recordings whose direction is nominally attributed to the Russian composer (performing the previous rehearsals or, even, wielding the baton himself in the studio, invisible to future listeners), it was also there where he published his constant incursions into a repertoire that, If it did not give money, it did provide an undeniable prestige. In many cases, especially in chamber pieces or for small ensembles, Craft used studio musicians, paid by the hour, very abundant both in New York and Los Angeles, where good instrumentalists were always needed to record soundtracks. And he was in charge, of course, of the Columbia Symphony Orchestra, created exclusively for recording projects, and conducted by big names such as Bruno Walter, Thomas Beecham and Stravinsky himself.
This is how Craft concluded the first commercial integral of Webern's works, earlier in a decade and a half to that completed by Pierre Boulez in England for the same label. In 1958 he even dared in Los Angeles with the very complex Le marteau sans maître by the French musician, premiered only three years earlier in Baden-Baden. But his most radical and ambitious endeavor was perhaps to record Schönberg's opera omnia, in which he counted, for example, with the complicity of a young Glenn Gould, always ready to support impossible causes, who recorded the pieces for solo piano, the diabolically difficult instrumental part of the song cycle The Book of Hanging Gardens or the almost untouchable Piano Concerto. In Schönberg's colossal transcription of Brahms' Piano Quartet No. 1, Craft gave himself the luxury of conducting none other than the Chicago Symphony.
Stravinsky, of course, could not be missed, although represented here much more modestly than the Second Vienna School, although with great versions, "supervised by the composer", to reinforce its patina of authenticity, of The Wedding, the Symphony for wind instruments or the Capriccio for piano and orchestra. There are also nods to the weaknesses of the Russian, and almost the most surprising of this box are the madrigals of Gesualdo (with the striking presence in the vocal group of Marilyn Horne), paired, of course, with Monumentum pro Gesualdo di Venosa by Stravinsky himself, some Vespers of Monteverdi (remember that Craft's mentor is buried in Venice), with Michael Tilson Thomas on harpsichord, or two Bach cantatas, with a clearly improvable choir conducted by the later legendary Margaret Hillis. It should be remembered that interpreting this repertoire was not then normalized as it is now, so it was truly exceptional, if not bizarre, incursions, almost as much as bringing to record the Serenade op. 24 or Schönberg's The Happy Hand.
There is no version, of whatever style (you can hear here, for example, Mozart's Gran Partita, Schütz's spiritual concertos, several masterpieces by Edgard Varèse or Stockhausen's Zeitmaße), in which Craft does not perceive the desire to interpret, to print a personal, and not only metronomic, stamp on the music he conducts. It is not fair to compare them with later recordings made with modern orchestras or with historicist groups of the quality of the current ones, but it is convenient to place them in their time (fifties and sixties of the last century, mostly) and their place (United States before the arrival of globalization). As he demonstrated in his numerous reviews for The New York Review of Booksor in his more than interesting autobiography, Down a Path of Wonder (Naxos, 2006), Craft was an extremely cultured person with outstanding wit. This reissue, which reproduces all the original covers and covers of the old elepés, confirms unequivocally that, beyond Stravinsky and that asymmetrical couple that both decided to form, Bob Craft (as everyone knew him) was also an extraordinary musician.
'The Complete Columbia Album Collection'. Robert Craft. Sony. 44 CD.
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