Danses concertantes

The Danses concertantes were commissioned by the Werner Janssen Orchestra of Los Angeles, and was intended not for the stage but for concert performance. Stravinsky nevertheless cast it in the form of an abstract ballet, composing it in Hollywood beginning in 1941. The score was completed on 13 January 1942, and it was published later that same year by Associate Music Publishers in New York. The composer conducted the first performance, with the Werner Janssen Orchestra, in Los Angeles on 8 February 1942 (White 1979, 410). The French premiere, in February 1945 on the second of an extended series of concerts devoted to Stravinsky's work, was met by vocal protests from a group of students from Olivier Messiaen's class, including Serge Nigg, who found Stravinsky's neoclassicism to be intolerably old-fashioned. Although this action has been interpreted as a championing of post-war serialism, in fact at this early date it was the exoticism and mysticism of Messiaen's music that fired the young composers' imagination, and not Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique (Sprout 2013, 151–57).