In Sunday’s (11/20) Los Angeles Times, Mark Swed writes, “In the Getty’s shiny large catalog for the Pacific Standard Time festival, Igor Stravinsky’s name is a mere footnote. He is added to a list of émigré artists, and even there he comes after novelist Thomas Mann and philosopher-critic Theodor Adorno. He meant more. When Stravinsky arrived in Los Angeles from Europe in 1940—having just married his longtime mistress, Vera Sudeikin—he was 58 and the world’s most famous composer. He became an American citizen in 1945 and remained here until 1969, when he moved to New York (where he died in 1972). You could even say that during much of the designated 1945-to-1980 period of the [Pacific Standard Time festival], a section of the L.A. arts scene became Stravinsky Standard Time. SST was a strange, exotic time zone indeed, but a significant one. Stravinsky gave us a certain cultural credibility that the presence of no other artist in any field could match. He was our art icon. … Throughout his L.A. years, Stravinsky was a celebrity who frequently conducted as well as composed. … The music of his L.A. years is not on the Stravinsky hit parade the way some of his earlier scores are. The more formidable of the later works are unjustly neglected, but they opened new vistas as original and vast as any the visual artists were exploring.”
Posted November 21, 2011
