During a rehearsal of Tchaikovsky’s Second Symphony at Aspen in 1950, Igor Stravinsky was surprised when the orchestra, at his downbeat, responded with the strains of “Happy Birthday.” It turned out the players were honoring a fellow musician who had just had a child.
But Stravinsky, as he explained later, “quite failed to ‘get it,’ and for some time I considered myself the victim of a practical joke.”
He must have eventually enjoyed the joke, however, because the next year wrote his own variations on the familiar tune by Mildred Hill in a series of canons. And finally, for a concert honoring Pierre Monteaux’s 80th birthday on April 4, 1955, he created Greeting Prelude. It apparently went over well, although Stravinsky, who thought “Happy Birthday” was in the public domain, was surprised to find out that royalties must still be paid to the copyright holder for any performance. In honor of Stravinsky’s own 80th birthday in 1962, Leonard Bernstein led the New York Philharmonic in the piece during one of his televised Young People’s Concerts, thus bringing the birthday joke around full circle.
Greeting Prelude is an energetic and quintessentially Stravinskian take on Hill’s ditty, full of playful counterpoint and harmonic surprises. His disjointed treatment of the original tune, with major seventh leaps, make it sound almost like a serial or 12-tone version. As Bernstein said, “you can never mistake that Stravinsky sound.” You won’t mistake Redwood Symphony’s own unique sound as they perform the piece at today’s 20th birthday celebration.