Igor Stravinsky

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Paris 1920. When Coco Chanel meets Igor Stravinsky, the exiled composer accepts the wealthy designer's offer to bring his family to summer at her villa. Soon she and her guest embark upon an affair which is complicated by their rigid devotion to their work, and Stravinsky's commitment to his family. The two lovers must consider the depth of their feelings, and whether, with the autumn drawing in, theirs is a relationship that can survive.

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky is the first of the celebrated series of conversation books in which Stravinsky, prompted by Robert Craft, reviewed his long and remarkable life. The composer brings the Imperial Russia of his childhood vividly into focus, at the same time scanning what were at the time the brave new horizons of Boulez and Stockhausen with extraordinary acuity. Stravinsky answers searching questions about his musical development and recalls his association with Diaghilev and the Russian Ballet. There are sympathetic and extraordinarily illuminating reminiscences of such composers as Debussy and Ravel ('the only musicians who immediately understood Le Sacre du Printemps'), while mischievous squibs are directed at others, most notably perhaps against Richard Strauss, all of whose operas Stravinsky wished 'to admit ... to whichever purgatory punishes triumphant banality'. The conversations are by no means confined to musical subjects, ranging uninhibitedly across all the arts: Stravinsky gives unforgettable sketches of Ibsen, Rodin, Proust, Giacometti, Dylan Thomas and T S Eliot. 'The conversations between Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft are unique in musical history. The penetration of Craft's questions and the patience and detail of Stravinsky's answers combine to produce an intimate picture of a man who has sometimes puzzled, often delighted, and always intrigued ...' The Sunday Times

As perhaps the most influential composer of the twentieth century, Igor Stravinsky lived much of his long life on the public stage. But behind that public face was a very private man, at once father and husband, and patriarch of an extended but tightly knit Russian family.This two-part chronicle is written by his eldest son Theodore, and Theodore's wife Denise. These intimate memoirs take us to the very heart of the Stravinsky family home in the years leading up to the Second World War.This new volume also contains a wealth of family photographs, revealing the composer not as the often forbidding figure of the official photographic record, but as a husband and father at play and at work in the midst of a large and vibrant family.

Studie over het werk van de Russische componist (1882-1971).