ABSTRACT
Igor Stravinsky's Danses concertantes, conducted by Roger Désormière for the Société privée de musique de chambre, had been greeted with protests from these same young musicians. After the Liberation, French Radio, on the instructions of its musical director Henry Barraud, broadcast Stravinsky's complete orchestral works, which had hardly been played during the Occupation. On 3 February Poulenc took part, playing one of the pianos in Les Noces with Monique Haas, Geneviève Joy and Pierre Sancan, with the French Radio Choir and National Orchestra conducted by Manuel Rosenthal. The whole of contemporary music, inside and outside France, near or far, is a tributary of the work of Stravinsky, in the same way that, from 1900 to 1910, Debussy covered the music of both cultures with his elegant shadow. Incredible as it may seem, to take up the pen to defend Igor Stravinsky, because there is currently, as in the great days of The Rite of Spring, a Stravinsky scandal.
