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So, now to my theme: Stravinsky, the man. He was a notoriously narky old codger.......so what was he covering up, what was he so shirty about? I know the cello parts well now, so I'm free to fuss less about them, and fuss more about what the hell he was trying to say. Will the real Stravinsky please stand up!

Take an early piece, like the Symphony in E flat - any talented students could have done it - like Glazunov or one of his drinking pals. An early piano sonata, that he said was like late Beethoven - except that it isn't, it's more like Tchaikovsky. Then suddenly we're into The Firebird, and the other two great ballets, Petrushka and the Rite. Mind you, he saved time by not writing his own tunes - he 'liberated' them from folk music collections made by the likes of Liadov and Taneyev. Every bar of Firebird reeks of Rimsky-Korsakov - the orchestration, the moods, the theatrical transformations, and the borrowed tunes - but every bar still reeks equally of Stravinsky. (If you've played Rimsky's late opera, Golden Cockerell, thirty times you'll definitely know what I mean.) Now't wrong with Stravinsky's borrowing; it's overt, acknowledged, everyone is grown up and consenting, and it doesn't detract one iota from his genius. Next: the opening scene of Petrushka. This spills us out of our carriage into the middle of the hustle and bustle of the 'Shrove Tide Fair'. We immediately stumble into some life-long obsessions of his: mechanical music, broken and wheezy barrel organs, village bands (two or three within earshot at the same time), a bibulous bass player, so drunk he's playing half a bar out, and worse, he's playing a march while the others play a waltz, until he collapses. Next: kick the barrel organ with a large hobnailed boot, break a few more cogs and pipes, and you get to the Rite of Spring - it's not such a big musical step as historians like to think. Wheel up another barrel organ, a semi-tone out of tune with the first, and you get the F flat chord jammed alongside an E flat chord, famously in that iconic stomp near the beginning. Add another jar of vodka and you've got the pounding rhythms and expletives of the bass player falling down the steps. Add a severe toothache, like Stravinsky suffered while he was finishing the score, and you've got that notoriously chaotic final scene. He can epihpanise as much as he likes about the Great Russian Spring inspiring him.....if you've got tooth-ache, the tooth-ache wins. Or did the music give him the tooth-ache? Boulez described the Rite as a huge fist, brandished at the whole history of music. I agree.

Jump ahead a decade and he's into neo-classicism. Fake Pergolesi. Fake Bach. Fake Tchaikovsky. Haydn, jazz, circus bands, Orthodox chant, Japanese music....what a magpie! You should read Constant Lambert in Music Ho! (1933) on Stravinsky's neo-classicism - utterly scathing. Stravinsky was flitting around his friends' wardrobes, trying on their gear. Did he actually have any clothes of his own? We played Fairy's Kiss the other day - his Tchaikovskiana. It's reverent, loving, long and indulgent. Somehow Stravinsky had percolated the master's music so much that it became his own; and even he owned up to not being able to tell the difference. That's what he did. At the end there is that Cinerama version of None but the Lonely Heart; sequence by sequence he apes the great gasping build up to The Tune in Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet. Ah! Is this what he wanted all along? And then he goes and leaves precisely that bit out of his concert suite........maybe it wasn't something he wanted to be seen doing in public. Now I see him differently. You have to hear the complete ballets; he airbrushed his revealing bits out the concert suites. Much of this ballet reeks of Sleeping Beauty, which is bad news for me because, in its turn, it reeks of the bowdlerised Tchaikovsky in Disney's cartoon version. We also played Danses Concertantes in the same programme; this was commissioned for a Broadway review. Serious flirting. Of course, he always had an eye for a lucrative option, so he donned his 'come on' kit and wrote something accessible (enough), got past the doorman, and then went and flunked the final golden clinch - the price of that ecstasy was to abandon editorial control of his music (bending over to bowdlerisation).....actually, he relented later.....when no-one was looking. (Ker-chinggg!) He was a genius. In one of the Danses he confidently writes A Big Tune In C Major, plonked down like a massive gateau. Wonderful. But if heard cold, I'd have sworn that it had been liberated from Prokofiev's waste paper bin. It's pure Prokofiev - the melody, accompaniment and orchestration. You should read Stravinsky on Prokofiev - utterly scathing. Prokofiev had gone back to Soviet Russia and (here's the rub) written towering, original, and popular masterpieces in every genre. Exiled, and writing Dansesfor Broadway, Stravinsky has to deny himself, make a show of fighting the habit, pretend he doesn't care, dissemble. For example: he writes some duets, one for violins and another for cellos, where he tells the players not to use vibrato. You can imagine what the Broadway session boys thought of that. They refused - even while he was conducting them. He wrote grumpy letters about it. I know how they felt; I had to do it at the London Proms - you switch off the vib, launch into that lovely little duet, you're nervous enough playing a solo at a London Prom, and wait for the sharp intake of breath, "Grief, that guy can't play the cello!" (Well, maybe I can't, but I can do vibrato.) .......and another thing.......quite irrelevant....the poster for our Russian Winter is in Soviet style art - exactly what Stravinsky and Rachmaninov hated! The big question: did Stravinsky really want to hold aloft that great fist, and brandish it? Wouldn't he have wanted us to love him? Wouldn't he have loved to be able to compose a 'real' ballet, like his hero Tchaikovsky, which people loved, not hated......like Prokofiev's Romeo? I wonder.

Jump forward another decade or so and he's come all over atonal and serial. Have you noticed the distinct grumpiness in much of his music? Even at its happiest, it's got the cold gaze of the Sphinx. Agon is argument choreographed; it's also Stravinsky's last word about ballet. In Jeu de Cartes groups of dancers get cross with each other - vying poker hands. In Orpheus he strips the famous story down to bare gestures - and more squabbles. Apollo makes his Muses really cross (lumbered with such awful unpronounceable names, they were probably cross before Apollo rejected them). At one point in Orpheus a mandolin tinkles away over on one side of the orchestra, while on the other side two double bass players footle around in high harmonics, far up in the unknown zone (chaps have to go on diets to stretch for these notes). Aphoristic emphemeralities? Agon has a movement called 'Branles Gay', in which you can enjoy the sound of one castanet clapping - accompanying a few whispy wheezes from other instruments. Our CD sessions on Orheus and Agon are going to be a tad nerve scratching. This 'late' music is acerbic, laconic, crystalline, inscrutable. Every now and then the mask slips; you might just glimpse the smile of a melody.... before the mask is snatched back. Is this what they call 'pure' or 'classical' music? (We have to play the stuff....and keep you interested....we're not too bothered by the answer to that.) But even with his intellectual rigour, he is always telling a story. His music takes us from here to there, and the view out of the window is fascinating. The Huxley Variatons is probably his most cantankerously grumpy piece (his last orchestral thoughts). Even within the span of this tiny opus, he rams us through his intellectual mincer, inexorably towards a sense of arrival, a sense of resolution and peace....even apotheosis. He infamously stated that his music was pure music, was free from emotion, says nothing of itself. Then he dissembled again, and spent the rest of his life backtracking, explaining what it was that he meant to say, didn't say, or didn't mean to say, or what the hell. He even averred that his music was not for grownups, who are all corrupted by music education, and that it could only be understood by children and animals. My children aren't impressed, nor is Alfie, our cat. He harps on about 'pure' music, and gets his knickers in a real twist; as did his courtiers and sycophants as they chorused his pronouncements. If only he'd have come clean, come out honest, and written a stompingly life-affirming Great Russian Symphony like Prokofiev's fifth, or written a gloriously and unremittingly miserable piece like Rachmaninov's Isle of the Dead ("Rothesay, it's not!", said my colleague, Harry)........on second thoughts, he'd probably been unable to resist fusing Tchaikovsky's famous 'Fruit and Nut Case' tune into it. That's my thesis: he didn't know who he was. But nor do we.....know who he was.....or who we are....? Oh......I should mention, Rachmaninov had had a major breakdown. The critics did it to him. Then, after some liberating therapy he wrote Isle of the Dead, which must have been a bit of a relapse. Talking about critics, I'm looking forward to playing the original version of Rachmaninov's fourth concerto, for my first time, as he meant it, before the harpies cowed him into hacking chunks off it. He was an interesting fruit and nut case though: considering the over-burgeoning extravagance and romanticism of his piano writing, like in the third concerto, his own playing shone with a blinding classical clarity, Mozartian even, and absolutely unbelievable control. Play his recordings, and you'll see who he really was. Talking about the influence of Golden Cockerell, it was one of only two scores with which Rachmaninov escaped from Russia, and he kept it with him all his life. Rachmaninov was famously described by Stravinsky as six and half feet of Russian scowl. Rachmaninov gloomily fuses the Dies Irae chant into just about everything he wrote (practising for his big day), but, actually, he was a jokey guy, full of family fun, into fast cars and speed boats. So, who was the softie trying to be firm, and who was the hard nut trying to lighten up? Who really knows who really was who, really? I'm giving up wondering.