| Witness The Rite of Spring – a rite of passage for the Philharmonia Orchestra’s new Principal Conductor, and a visceral experience for performers and listeners alike.
Stravinsky’s ballet changed the course of music history, with its stamping rhythms, violent dissonances, and menacing, primeval soundworld. Its story of pagan rituals heralding the spring, culminating in a sacrificial dance, leaves us in no doubt as to how closely human lives are tied to the life and rhythms of the Earth. Silvestre Revueltas’s score for the 1939 Mexican film La Noche de los Mayas also evokes a time before modern ‘civilisation’ separated us from nature. The part we hear tonight echoes The Rite of Spring in its driving rhythms and eerie woodwind opening, but its extended percussion section is unmistakably Latin American. In 1909, a young Russian composer named Igor Stravinsky was recruited to orchestrate some music by Chopin for a ballet project. The project was called Les Sylphides, and the performances would take place in Paris under the auspices of a brand new dance company. This was the Ballets Russes, the first Russian ballet company to tour internationally, featuring leading dancers from the country’s imperial theatres. Masterminded by the impresario (and failed composer) Sergei Diaghilev, the company enjoyed a wildly successful first season in Paris … but their programme lacked any original Russian works. And so it was that the 27-year-old Stravinsky was approached, on the back of his Chopin orchestrations, to compose a score to a story that Diaghilev and his colleagues had determined would be their 1910 hit: The Firebird. Stravinsky fans will know that The Firebird and its successor, Petrushka, were the works that catapulted the composer to international fame overnight. With each passing year, Stravinsky’s ambition—and, indeed, his power within the company—grew. In collaboration with the designer Nikolai Roerich, he dreamed up the ‘vision’ of an ancient pagan ritual, in which the arrival of spring is marked by a young maiden forced by tribal elders to dance herself to death as a virgin sacrifice. The score took Stravinsky two years to finish, and the lead-up to the premiere was fraught with difficulties and complaints not only from the orchestra, who thought the score unfeasibly difficult, but also the dancers. Choreographed by the young Vaslav Nijinsky, the piece required the company to ignore all their previous training that focused on fluid, beautiful lines, and instead move in awkward, shuffling steps that bent their bodies in unfamiliar ways. "A fresh chance to revel in Stravinsky’s 1913 ballet-score The Rite of Spring, this performance recorded at the Royal Festival Hall in October 2021: ‘A Rite full of individual brilliance from wind players, of tightly focused string sound and of explosive tutti … thrilling" (David Karlin, Bachtrack) 01. Stravinsky- The Rite of Spring- Introduction – Adoration of the Earth |
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