The Volcanic Stravinsky
by Sedgwick Clark
MONTREUX, SWITZERLAND. This has been some week! My wife and I have been here to celebrate a friend’s 70th birthday. At the same time, I have been looking forward avidly, as readers of this space know, to the New York Philharmonic’s “Russian Stravinsky” festival, which begins tonight. But I won’t be at Avery Fisher because we weren’t able to get home in time due to that damned volcano in Iceland. (Calls to mind the volcanos in the Sacre section of Disney’s Fantasia.) I’ll be somewhere over the Atlantic—perhaps at the same time as the Mariinsky Chorus, which also couldn’t make it to New York in time.
The confluence of events seemed made in heaven. Three weeks of Stravinsky concerts preceded by the pleasure of visiting near the town where the great man composed his most famous work, Le Sacre du 
printemps. In the warm sunlight glittering off Lake Geneva we strolled along Quai Ernest Ansermet, named after the man who conducted the first performance of L’Histoire du soldat in 1918 and was a lifetime champion of Stravinsky. We cut over in front of the Casino to walk up perhaps the shortest road in the world, Rue Igor Stravinsky.
Before leaving Montreux proper, we dropped by the Auditorium Stravinski; the season had ended, but my Musical America business card was evidently impressive enough to get us a personal tour by the hospitality manager, Nathalie Tippmann, a friendly young woman who had lived in Atlanta for six years. The Montreux Jazz Festival, which just celebrated its 40th year, is obviously the 
town’s primary musical event. There are statues of Vladimir Nabokov, B.B. King, Miles Davis, Ray Charles, and Freddie Mercury (of the rock group Queen) on prominent display, but no I.S. Then we drove to Clarens, hoping to find the house where Stravinsky lived when he composed Le Sacre. Apparently it no longer exists, but at least there’s a street named after the work.
The dreaded volcano dust seems to be abating, so it’s “Home, James.” We considered several possibilities: flying from Milan for $36,000 on Tuesday; $32,000 from Geneva on Friday; $8,000 from Paris on Sunday. Instead, we take a train from Lausanne at 6 a.m. to Zurich, fly to Amsterdam for a three-hour layover before flying to Kennedy and arriving at 10 p.m.
I wonder if there’s a Concertgebouw matinee?