Chamber Orchestra's "Histoire du Soldat'

Orchestra 2001 gave me one of my fondest musical memories when it presented a fully staged version of Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat some 20 years ago. Unfortunately, I may be the only person in Philadelphia who savors the memory. Orchestra 2001 usually attracts reasonable audiences, but it scheduled L'Histoire as the opening event of that season; it apparently hit the boards before most of their followers realized the summer had ended. The handful of performers on the stage really did outnumber the audience.

Since then, I've attended several L'Histoire performances that omitted the acting and dancing. None matched the Orchestra 2001 event. The Chamber Orchestra's effort this month was the first fully satisfying performance any other organization has mounted, even though puppets replaced human actors in some of the key scenes.

None of the elements of L'Histoire du Soldat can stand alone. Stravinsky's score is jazzy, ironic and lively, but it's too straightforward to hold your interest all by itself. The story is a relatively conventional deal-with-the-devil tale, with the soldier's cheap violin serving as his soul. The acting and dancing consist of pantomimes and brief bits of folk dancing, with none of the flashy acrobatic displays that excite dance audiences.

When you put all the elements together, however, L'Histoire du Soldat sparkles. It's a successful bit of show business, just as Stravinsky intended.

Flexible production

Stravinsky created L'Histoire in response to the austerities imposed by World War I. He conceived it as a low-budget production that could tour Swiss villages and offer the locals a small-scale musical spectacle with a simple, easily understood story line. It requires a narrator and three other performers, and it's scored for seven instruments: one violin, one double bass, four winds, and percussion.

Stravinsky deliberately designed the piece so it could be modified to fit new situations. The Chamber Orchestra combined puppets with mimes and placed the stage business in the capable, imaginative hands of Robert Smythe, the former director of Mum Puppettheater.

Visible puppeteers

The puppets Smythe designed for this production are essentially dolls that the puppeteers manipulate much the same way children maneuver dolls and action figures. The puppeteers are fully visible, and their activities become part of the fable. The soldier is played by a mime when he begins his march toward home, but when he sells his soul he becomes a doll-size puppet, manipulated by shadowy figures.

Stravinsky probably would have approved of the revisions in the narration. The soldier trades his violin for a magic book that's supposed to bring him wealth. The spells in this version of the book include arcane incantations like "mortgage-backed securities" and "too big to fail."

Contrast with Petrushka

Smythe's puppeteers made an interesting contrast to the approach taken by Basil Twist in his production of the other Stravinskian puppet epic included in the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts. Twist, like Smythe, employed onstage puppeteers in his puppet version of Stravinsky's Petrushka ballet. But Twist hid his puppetmasters by combining a black backdrop with back lighting and head-to-toe black clothing.

As Jonathan Stein notes in his BSR review, Twist wanted to create a fantasy version of Petrushka. His puppets engage in leaps and turns that no flesh-and-blood ballet star could pull off. Visible puppeteers would have marred the fantasy images Twist offered his audience.

But of course we know the puppeteers are there. The spectacle holds our attention partly because we know it's produced by an exercise in human ingenuity.

Musicians worth watching

Both productions adhered to an important principle of Stravinsky's aesthetic creed. Stravinsky believed that the musicians were one of the attractions of a musical performance. In the Chamber Orchestra's L'Histoire du Soldat, the musicians were grouped on the left side of the stage, in full sight of the audience, as Stravinsky specified. For Twist's production at the Annenberg Center, the visual effects included two grand pianos, prominently displayed in front of the puppet stage, played by twin sisters, Julia and Irina Elkina.

Duets for two pianos are one of the great spectacles in music— an exhilarating combination of high art and high-wire teamwork. L'Histoire du Soldat offered a spectacle that was just as compelling— the bravura violin part that the Chamber Orchestra's concertmaster, Gloria Justen, played with her customary flair.

In L'Histoire, in addition, Stravinsky's staging arrangements generate one of the magical touches that transform his wartime miniature into a 20th Century classic. As you watch a master violinist play a real violin, an equally accomplished mime matches her, move for move, as he plays a fake violin. You observe, simultaneously, the illusion and the creation of the illusion.