Composers Datebook™ is a daily two-minute program designed to inform, engage, and entertain listeners with timely information about composers of the past and present. Each program notes significant or intriguing musical events involving composers of the past and present, with appropriate and accessible music related to each.
Stravinsky's "Dumbarton Oaks" Concerto
On today's date in 1938, a musical soirée was held at Dumbarton Oaks, a magnificent house on the crest of a wooded valley near Washington, D.C. This was the home of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss. Mr. Bliss had retired from a distinguished career in the U.S. Foreign Service, which included a posting in St. Petersburg in 1907, around the same time a young Russian composer name Igor Stravinsky was getting some of his first public performances there. Mr. and Mrs. Bliss commissioned Stravinsky to write a Concerto for Chamber Orchestra to be premiered at their May 8, 1938 soirée in celebration of their 30th wedding anniversary, a work now known as the "Dumbarton Oaks Concerto." "A little concerto in the style of the Brandenburg Concertos," was how Stravinsky put it, adding, "I played Bach very regularly during the composition of the concerto, and I was greatly attracted to the Brandenburg Concertos. Whether or not the first theme of my first movement is a conscious borrowing from the third of the Brandenburg set, however, I do not know. What I can say is that Bach would most certainly have been delighted to loan it to me; to borrow in this way was exactly the sort of thing he liked to do."