Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring: Keeping Score | PBS Shop Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring You never know when or where revolutions will start. They can be social or political or artistic. Often, these artistic revolutions—revolutions in taste—seem to predict other changes in society. That's exactly the case with The Rite of Spring. Igor Stravinsky wrote The Rite of Spring in 1913. It redefined 20th-century music, much as Beethoven's Eroica had transformed music a century before. With it, Stravinsky took himself far into the realm of the unconscious. The music seemed designed with no apparent order but driven by pure gut feeling. Russian Influences In turn-of-the-century St. Petersburg, everything fashionable seemed to be from anyplace but Russia. The architecture, the music, even the language that the "best" people spoke was French. But artists of all kinds in Russia revolted against this dependence on European ideas. They wanted to establish a nationalist, Russian identity. A powerful mover among them was Stravinsky's teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov.

Rimsky had been a member of the so-called “Mighty Handful,” a group of adventurous, original young composers who began writing music that sounded truly Russian. They were inspired by the old myths and epics and fairy tales. And they all used folksongs and chants to give their music a very particular Russian flavor. Composers such as Rimsky-Korsakov provided lushly orchestrated music that served as the soundtrack for lavish operas and ballets at the imperial theater. But the imperial theater could bog down in bureaucracy and favoritism, stifling the most creative and ambitious artists of the day. Diaghilev and Paris Among those artists was Serge Diaghilev, a producer and aesthete with great energy and vision. He believed in the artistic future of all things authentically Russian. In the face of controversy with the imperial theater, Diaghilev went abroad. Diaghilev knew that Parisian audiences were fascinated by Russian culture, which made Paris the perfect place for Diaghilev's revolutionary Ballets Russes. Diaghilev created a new ballet company built on the Parisian fantasies of old Russia.

Featuring the exotic, the erotic, and the occult, the Ballets Russes astonished the world in its first season. For the company's second season, Diaghilev had promised a daring new ballet, but a crisis loomed when two Russian composers failed to deliver an acceptable score. Desperate, Diaghilev turned to the young, untried Igor Stravinsky to write the music we now know as The Firebird, which premiered in Paris in 1910. Based on the Slavic myth of a phoenix-like creature who helps a prince triumph over evil, The Firebird was a huge success. Russian Village Music Stravinsky wanted to bring music back to the origins of dance. He frequently summered in Ustilug, where he was exposed to the old Russian culture that thrived in villages surrounding his family's country home. In the villages, people celebrated the times of planting and harvesting, and the mysteries of gods and fate. Naturally, the villagers celebrated with music, made with whatever they had—their natural, untrained voices, their hands and feet, and instruments which they had often built themselves. The result was a wild, enthusiastic mixture of song and noise.

This kind of music-making made an enormous impression on the young Stravinsky. He wanted to use the sophisticated symphony orchestra to evoke the wild power of village music—the way it sounded and the way it must have felt to the people making it. The Rite of Spring By 1913, Paris adored the Ballets Russes, with its lavish productions that star dancer Vaslav Nijinsky choreographed. The opulent sets were designed by Nicholas Roerich, and the brilliant scores were written by the now resident composer, Igor Stravinsky. And then came the most famous opening-night scandal in history: the premiere of The Rite of Spring. As the crowd arrived on opening night, expectations were high. The Théàtre des Champs Élysées had just opened, and audience members came to see and be seen. Stravinsky was nervous because he knew that avant-garde pieces were risky in Paris. Decades before, Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser had been booed off the stage at the Opera. But danger was the exciting part. Stravinsky had had great success here in the past with The Firebird and Petrushka.

As the curtain went up and the opening notes were heard, a ruckus broke out in the auditorium. The opening bassoon solo was set so high that the audience didn’t know what instrument they were hearing. As the lights came up on the first tableau of dancers, people began yelling, and a wilder and wilder shouting match began. It became difficult to hear the music. As he heard the roar of the audience begin to build, Stravinsky panicked and ran backstage to intervene. By the time he reached the wings, things were in complete chaos. But the performance continued. Diaghilev may have expected there would be some kind of ruckus at the performance. Unbeknownst to Stravinsky and Nijinsky, he had instructed the conductor, Pierre Monteux, to keep going no matter what happened. Stravinsky had taken the orchestra, which was associated with high society and culture, and brought it to this carnal, bestial, earthy level. The audience was making so much noise that the dancers could not hear the music and stay in sync.

So Nijinsky climbed on a chair and leaned out so far into the set that Stravinsky had to grab him by his coattails to keep him from falling over. Amidst the huge racket of the orchestra and the crowd and the pounding of the dancers’ feet, Nijinsky was there yelling out the numbers: 19, 20, 21, 22! Back to Russian Folk Roots What did Stravinsky write that was so powerful? He wanted to recreate ancient times, a time of a huge, untouched landscape within which a few tribal people gathered once a year to celebrate their relationship to the earth. For the raw material, Stravinsky turned to a book that contained all kinds of folksongs with roots in those pagan rituals. Stravinsky knew this music well from his summers in Ustilug. But he had to figure out what instruments could play these folk sounds. The orchestra is made up of modern instruments of great sophistication. These instruments have no relationship to the instruments that people make with their own hands. Stravinsky’s solution was to write for the instruments of the modern orchestra in bizarre ways. He pushed them to the extreme heights and depths of their ranges.

He put them in uncomfortable positions which resulted in that strained, weird quality he was looking for. He mimicked the authentic village sound by adding grace notes to the lines, which suggested the vocal breaks of untutored singers. Village dances were made up of teams moving in different patterns. In much the same way, teams of instruments play in the Rite. The alternation of these teams, splitting up to form and reform, maintain the excitement of the piece. Sometimes the teams alternate, but sometimes they keep playing until they create a huge pile-up of sound, in which no one is willing to stop or give in to anyone else. The point of this is sensory overload, until the conflict takes us to complete burnout. What makes this piece stand apart from anything written before is the rawness and vitality of the rhythmic elements. The Rite of Spring may not be as shocking today as it was at that scandalous premiere in 1913, but more than 90 years later, it still has that edgy, intense, almost out-of-control feeling that makes it as exhilarating—and liberating—as music can be. More Episodes Music History 102 Born: Oranienbaum, near St.

Petersburg, June 17, 1882 Died: New York, April 6, 1971 While pursuing law studies in 1902, Stravinsky met Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov , who advised the young man to study music. Stravinsky began studying with the famous Russian composer in 1903, and after Rimsky's death in 1908, never had another teacher. His early works caught the imagination of ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929), impressario of the famed Ballets Russes, who invited Stravinsky to compose a ballet. The result was the voluptuous and impressionistic (with Stravinskian overtones) The Firebird in 1910. This was followed by the even more successful Petrushka in 1911. With his ballet The Rite of Spring in 1913, with its representations of prehistoric pagan Russian rituals and sacrifice, Stravinsky's music ignited the most famous riot in the history of music.

With its savage rhythms, absence of melody, and barbaric energy, The Rite of Spring marks the true beginnings of Twentieth Century music, and even today never fails to thrill or amaze listeners. With the advent of World War I, the production of large, spectacular ballets became financially unfeasible. Stravinsky applied his imagination and the energetic rhythms of The Rite of Spring to the choral work Les Noces (The Wedding), a piece scored for only four pianos, percussion, and voices. A further reduction of instrumental forces followed with the musical fable L'histoire du soldat (The Story of a Soldier), which requires only a narrator and seven instrumentalists, after the model of the Dixieland Jazz combo. The story concerns a soldier returning from war, a violin (the soldier's soul), and the devil. In the end, of course, the devil is triumphant. In 1920, Stravinsky settled in Paris, and entered a period of neo-classicism, in which he composed music modeled on the styles and forms, if not the melodies and harmonies, of Mozart and Haydn .

Some of the works composed in this style are the Octet for Winds, the opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex, the ballets Pulchinella and Apollon Musagète, the Symphony of Psalms, and Stravinsky's only full-scale opera, The Rake's Progress . When World War II broke out, Stravinsky fled Europe and came to the United States, where he settled in Hollywood, California. He eventually became an American citizen in 1940. In the 1950s, Stravinsky shocked the musical world by turning to serialism and produced the twelve-tone ballet Agon and the choral work Canticum Sacrum, among others. By this time, Stravinsky had lived long enough to see himself internationally honored as the western world's greatest living composer, and spent his last years conducting, recording his works, and granting interviews. His musical influence on composers of this century has been limitless.

Music History 102: a Guide to Western Composers and their music Designed, compiled and created by Robert Sherrane Stravinsky: The Genius Who Wrote The Rite of Spring Stravinsky: The Genius Who Wrote The Rite of Spring by DavidPaulWagner Igor Stravinsky's brilliant music scores stir up a lot of excitement. In fact, there was a riot at the premiere of his ballet "The Rite of Spring" and the police were called! In one of the most sensational events in music history, there was a riot when Stravinsky's ballet, "The RIte of Spring", was first staged and the police were called in! The music and choreography of the ballet were viewed as just too rhythmically powerful and "primitive". Today his works no longer cause riots but they still stir up passion and excitement! Let us look at the life, music and legacy of this leading 20th century composer. Life of Igor Stravinsky Stravinksy was born in St Petersburg, Russia in 1882. He started studying law but then, from 1902, began to learn music composition and instrumentation under the composer, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

In 1909 two of Stravinsky's orchestral compositions were heard by Sergei Diaghilev, the Russian ballet impresario and founder of the Ballets Russes (Russian Ballets). Diaghilev was impressed and commissioned him to compose a ballet score, The Firebird (French title, L'oiseau de feu). In 1910 Stravinsky moved from Russia to Paris and then to Switzerland. Over the next few years he composed more works for the Ballets Russes -- the ballet Petrushka, the ballet The Rite of Spring (French title, Le sacre du printemps), and the neo-classical ballet Pulcinella. In 1913 the audience at the Paris premiere of his ballet, The Rite of Spring, was so scandalized by the orchestral music and by the representation of a blood sacrifice and primitive fertility dances on stage, that a riot broke out and the police had to be called. The riot was actually great for publicity and overnight Stravinsky became the world's most famous composer. From 1920 until 1939 Stravinsky lived in France.

The works of this period included the opera-oratorio, Oedipus Rex (1927), the Symphony of Psalms (1930), and the ballet The Card Party (1936). Stravinsky moved residence again in 1939 when he traveled to the United States, where he was to reside until his death. In America he composed ballets such as Orpheus (1947) and The Rake's Progress (1951) and serial music influenced by Schoenberg and Berg, the latter works including his Canticum Sacrum (1955), the ballet Agon (1953-57) and the Requiem Canticles (1966). He toured the world conducting his works, with trips to Australia, Africa and to Soviet Russia (where his work had been banned for almost 30 years until Premier Krushchev invited him for a state visit in 1962). Stravinsky died in New York in 1971.

The Rite of Spring (by Igor Stravinsky) With the Joffrey Ballet (1987) Stravinsky's Musical Works Stravinsky's works can be divided into three periods: (1) The Russian Period (1908-19) His earliest music shows a truly original style (e.g. polyrhythms and dissonances) but with some influences from Russian folk music and from Rimsky-Korsakov and Debussy. He first burst onto the world scene with his three celebrated ballets: The Firebird (1910) The Rite of Spring (1913) After these came works with a new, more austere style.

For example: Histoire du soldat (The Soldier's Tale) (1918) the ballet Les Noces (The Wedding) (1914; 1919) (2) The Neoclassical Period (1920-54) His neoclassical works included: the opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex (1927) Symphonie des Psaumes (Symphony of Psalms) (1930) the ballet Orpheus (1947) the opera The Rake's Progress (1951) In this period Stravinsky became eclectic and was influence by everything from plainsong to Beethoven to jazz and swing. He also collaborated with great writers such as Jean Cocteau and W. H. Auden. (3) The Serial Period (1954-68) In this period Stravinsky used serial techniques such as we see in the composers Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg. From the latter he adopted dodecaphony (or twelve-tone technique).

Works in this period included: Canticum Sacrum (1955) Requiem Canticles (1966) Stravinksy Conducts The Firebird Rare video where the great Stravinsky conducts his own Firebird (the Lullaby suite) at the age of 82 Stravinsky's Legacy Stravinsky was one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century. In his first period (that of the ballets, The Firebird, Petroushka and The Rite of Spring), he proved to be a musical revolutionary and his works featured constantly changing rhythms and meters, dissonant harmonies, and brilliant and large scale orchestration. In his second, neoclassical period, he showed that you could use classical forms but have very deep emotion hidden beneath an apparently austere surface. In his third period (serial music), his works still retained much in common with his works of the two earlier periods, for example, an energetic rhythmical structure.

Stravinsky's Ballet, Petrushka (Petrouchka), 1976 Dancer: Rudolf Nureyev The Firebird | LA Phil The Firebird October 7, 2016 FastNotes Stravinsky dedicated The Firebird to his teacher and friend Rimsky-Korsakov, whose influence is reflected in (1) the luminous orchestration, (2) a thematic technique Rimsky used in The Golden Cockerel, and (3) the use of folk material. Even with its Old Russian heritage, Stravinsky’s ballet surges with newness and original elements (to be further exploited in Petrushka and The Rite of Spring). The story (from a Russian folk legend): Lost in the forest of Kastchei (an ogre who turns intruders to stone), Prince Ivan sees the Firebird plucking golden apples. He captures her, but frees her when she gives him a feather with magic powers. Thirteen enchanted princesses, playing with the apples, warn Ivan about Kastchei, who casts a spell on Ivan that the magic feather deflects. The Firebird causes Kastchei and his followers to dance until they drop.

Prince Ivan destroys an egg containing the ogre’s immortality. Kastchei dies, his stone captives return to life, and Ivan takes the loveliest princess as his bride. Composed: 1910 Length: c.

45 minutes Orchestration: piccolo, 3 flutes (3rd = piccolo 2), 3 oboes, English horn, 3 clarinets (3rd = clarinet in E-flat), bass clarinet, 3 bassoons (3rd = contrabassoon 2), contrabassoon, 4 horns (3rd and 4th = Wagner tubas), 3 trumpets (+ offstage trumpet), 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (bass drum, bells, cymbals, glockenspiel, tam-tam, tambourine, triangle, xylophone), 2 harps, piano, celesta, and strings First Los Angeles Philharmonic performance: August 8, 1972, Lawrence Foster conducting It’s intriguing to speculate how the history of music in the last century would have been altered if the extraordinary ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev had not decided to gamble on the young, relatively unknown Stravinsky.

Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes – which the émigré Russian had established in Paris – was just starting to take the West by storm, and Diaghilev wanted a splendid new production for the climax of its season in 1910. His initial plans for better-known composers fell through, so Diaghilev, on a hunch, gave the commission to Stravinsky, then in his late 20s. It was a risk for everyone concerned, since The Firebird would be the first production by the emerging ballet company to feature an entirely new score. Stravinsky was handed a scenario (devised in part by Fokine, the show’s choreographer) that drew on old Russian folklore. The Firebird tells of the downfall of a powerful, ogre-like figure of evil, Kastchei the Deathless, through the intervention of a beautiful rare bird – the enchanting character of the title. The miraculous Firebird is so called on account of her beautiful feathers, which glitter and flicker like flames. Kastchei is in the habit of seizing pretty young princesses as captives while turning the knights who arrive to rescue them into stone.

Crown Prince Ivan, the protagonist, enlists the Firebird’s help to destroy Kastchei and free his victims. You can readily hear how Stravinsky’s own imagination must have caught fire (he even set aside his work on a bird of a different feather – the fairy-tale opera The Nightingale – to take up Diaghilev’s invitation). The Firebird’s score blends the orchestral wizardry Stravinsky had learned as a student of Rimsky-Korsakov with the vitality of Russian folk music to yield a dazzling, evocative atmosphere. Throughout his later career, Stravinsky remained especially fond of The Firebird, returning to create three different concert versions that he himself conducted tirelessly (a savvy financial move on the composer’s part). The most popular is the second of these suites, introduced in 1919, which uses less than half of the original ballet score and simplifies some of its orchestration. The Firebird’s musical language shifts between exotic, chromatic gestures to illustrate the supernatural dimension (including a powerful non-Western scale that would later feature in the Rite of Spring’s harmonic vocabulary) and the sing-song simplicity of folk song for the mortals.

The ballet opens with a spooky conjuring, low in the strings, of Kastchei’s magical realm. In his illusory garden, Prince Ivan encounters the Firebird, which is depicted with opulent colors and radiant trills. (Diaghilev spared no expense in the similarly gorgeous costumes Léon Bakst designed for this creature.) A calmly pastoral section follows, featuring Stravinsky’s already characteristically imaginative scoring for woodwinds. Prince Ivan observes the princesses who have been captured by Kastchei performing their ritual Khorovod, or round dance, and falls in love with the one destined to be his bride. To protect Ivan, the Firebird casts a spell over Kastchei and his monstrous aides. Whipped into motion by Stravinsky’s frenetic rhythms, they are compelled to dance themselves to exhaustion in a savage Infernal Dance. Their paroxysms subside, while a serene Lullaby lulls the hypnotized Kastchei to sleep, its lazy tune first given by the bassoon. Ivan is instructed to destroy the giant egg containing the ogre’s soul, and Kastchei’s power vanishes.

A solo horn, intoning the score’s most-famous folk tune, announces the joyful arrival of sunlight. Together with Ivan and his betrothed, the rescued captives celebrate with music that swells and rings out in glorious triumph. The Firebird clearly shows Stravinsky on the cusp of a new world, mixing the orchestral mastery of his Russian mentors with the rhythmic vitality of the revolutionary about to burst out of his shell. Thomas May writes and lectures about music and theater and is a frequent contributor to Los Angeles Philharmonic programs. Igor Stravinsky | Biography & History | AllMusic google+ Artist Biography by Rovi Staff Igor Stravinsky was one of music's truly epochal innovators; no other composer of the twentieth century exerted such a pervasive influence or dominated his art in the way that Stravinsky did during his seven-decade musical career. Aside from purely technical considerations such as rhythm and harmony, the most important hallmark of Stravinsky 's style is, indeed, its changing face.

Emerging from the spirit of late Russian nationalism and ending his career with a thorny, individual language steeped in twelve-tone principles, Stravinsky assumed a number of aesthetic guises throughout the course of his development while always retaining a distinctive, essential identity. Although he was the son of one of the Mariinsky Theater's principal basses and a talented amateur pianist, Stravinsky had no more musical training than that of any other Russian upper-class child. He entered law school, but also began private composition and orchestration studies with Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov . By 1909, the orchestral works Scherzo fantastique and Fireworks had impressed Sergei Diaghilev enough for him to ask Stravinsky to orchestrate, and subsequently compose, ballets for his company.

Stravinsky 's triad of early ballets -- The Firebird (1909-1910), Petrushka (1910-1911), and most importantly, The Rite of Spring (1911-1913) -- did more to establish his reputation than any of his other works; indeed, the riot which followed the premiere of The Rite is one of the most notorious events in music history. Stravinsky and his family spent the war years in Switzerland, returning to France in 1920. His jazz-inflected essays of the 1910s and 1920s -- notably, Ragtime (1918) and The Soldier's Tale (1918) -- gave way to one of the composer's most influential aesthetic turns.

The neo-Classical tautness of works as diverse as the ballet Pulcinella (1919-1920), the Symphony of Psalms (1930) and, decades later, the opera The Rake's Progress (1948-1951) made a widespread impact and had an especial influence upon the fledgling school of American composers that looked to Stravinsky as its primary model. He had begun touring as a conductor and pianist, generally performing his own works. In the 1930s, he toured the Americas and wrote several pieces fulfilling American commissions, including the Concerto in E flat, "Dumbarton Oaks." After the deaths of his daughter, his wife, and his mother within a period of less than a year, Stravinsky emmigrated to America, settling in California with his second wife in 1940. His works between 1940 and 1950 show a mixture of styles, but still seem centered on Russian or French traditions.

Stravinsky 's cultural perspective was changed after Robert Craft became his musical assistant, handling rehearsals for Stravinsky , traveling with him, and later, co-authoring his memoirs. Craft is credited with helping Stravinsky accept 12-tone composition as one of the tools of his trade. Characteristically, though, he made novel use of such principles in his own music, producing works in a highly original vein: Movements (1958-1959) for piano and orchestra, Variations: Aldous Huxley in Memoriam (1963), and the Requiem Canticles (1965-1966) are among the most striking. Craft prepared the musicians for the exemplary series of Columbia Records LPs Stravinsky conducted through the stereo era, covering virtually all his significant works. Despite declining health in his last years, Stravinsky continued to compose until just before his death in April 1971.

Igor Stravinsky: Composer's life & music | Classic FM Igor Stravinsky Biography Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) was a Russian composer who revolutionised 20th-century music, and provoked riots with The Rite of Spring. Life and Music Stravinsky composed masterpieces in almost every genre, most notably an incomparable series of ballet scores. He discovered a way of rethinking the creative ideals of the 17th and 18th centuries in a thoroughly contemporary idiom and, in doing so, hit upon one of the most vital and far-reaching movements of the last 100 years: Neo-Classicism. Without Stravinsky the history of 20th-century music would have turned out quite differently. Although his father was a distinguished bass singer and the young Stravinsky was given every opportunity as a child, Stravinsky hardly showed the kind of unblinkered passion for music which one normally associates with a great composer. Indeed, he looked set for a career in jurisprudence until he met Rimsky-Korsakov, who immediately recognised he had a talent for composition and offered to teach him.

Stravinsky’s big break, the ballet The Firebird, came out of the blue. He was commissioned to compose the music only because Anatoly Lyadov let down the impresario Serge Diaghilev at the last minute. The premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, in Paris in June 1913, caused a sensation, and Stravinsky was catapulted from obscurity to stardom literally overnight. The notorious performance, interrupted throughout by a hail of farmyard noises from the gallery, ended in chaos with rival factions shouting abuse at each other, and the conductor and musicians fleeing in disarray. It is one of the miracles of Stravinsky’s output that while each and every piece could be by no one else, no two works sound remotely the same. Did you know? In 1942, the great ballet dancer-choreographer George Ballanchine commissioned Stravinsky to write a short piece of music for a ballet with elephants, during which one would lift Ballanchine’s then wife, Vera Zorina, up on to its back.

Classical Classics - Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, Classical Notes, Peter Gutmann As the earth blooms and the sky sings, the mere thought of Spring has inspired poets and composers through the ages to celebrate the resurgence of life with sweet, bouyant thoughts. But not Igor Stravinsky. His 1912 Le Sacre de Printemps (The Rite of Spring) was inspired by a vastly different muse. Surely one of the most important works in the annals of art, its impact still reverberates across all types of music. At the turn of the last century, serious music had reached the outer bounds of the tonal system and its future seemed in jeopardy. It took Stravinsky, in one bold and visionary gesture, to blast music into a wholly new realm of possibilities from which it would never return. The 28-year old Stravinsky was the toast of Paris. In 1910, he had launched his career with the hugely successful Firebird, a delightful ballet with a fanciful story and gorgeous music in the grand and familiar style of Tchaikovsky.

For the next season he wrote Petrouchka which, while more modern, was anchored in memorable folk tunes and offered a charming tale of intrigue among established Commedia del'Arte characters. It was with such wonderful memories firmly in mind that society audiences anticipated yet another fabulous but essentially traditional entertainment. Like its predecessors, The Rite was commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev for his Ballets Russes and was to be staged by Michel Fokine and choreographed by the legendary Vaslav Nijinski, the third triumphant crown of the most potent combination of music, art and dance that Europe had ever seen. But Stravinsky had other ideas. He would later say, I was guided by no system; I wrote what I heard. At the premiere, perhaps the most notorious of all time, it became immediately apparent that what he heard was without precedent. The troupe's conductor, Pierre Monteux, was introduced to the score when the composer played it for him on the piano. He recalled: The very walls resounded as Stravinsky pounded away, occasionally stamping his feet and jumping up and down to accentuate the force of the music.

Not that it needed such emphasis. Monteux thought Stravinsky was raving mad and predicted the music would cause a scandal. He was wrong: it provoked a full-scale riot. The extreme difficulty of the music demanded an augmented orchestra and the radical choreography required over a hundred rehearsals, which could not be accommodated as scheduled in the 1912 season. Instead, Ravel's Daphnis et Chloe was presented, fulfilling audience expectations with a mythic story, orthodox dancing and one of the most ravishing scores ever written. Anticipations for the delayed premiere of The Rite continued to rise. At last the fateful night of May 29, 1913 arrived. The first two minutes apparently went well, with the audience enthralled by the haunting introduction. But then, the astringent brutality of the first scene broke through as, in Stravinsky's words: the curtain rose on a group of knock-kneed and long-braided Lolitas jumping up and down. The subject itself was scandalous: instead of the fanciful amorous stuff of fluffy ballet dreams, ugly pagans sacrifice a maiden to propitiate the gods of spring.

The choreography, costumes and sets boldly dispensed with grace and beauty to emphasize awkward, primitive starkness. At first there were a few boos and catcalls, but then a storm broke as the outraged audience reacted by yelling and fighting. Diaghilev tried to quell the disturbance by switching the house lights on and off while Nijinski tried to sustain the performance as best he could by shouting out numbers and cues to the dancers, who couldn't hear the music, loud as it was, over the din. Stravinsky was furious and stormed out of the theater before police arrived to end the show. But as happens so often in art, the scandals of the past generate the foundations of the future. Indeed, the very next year Monteux introduced the score in concert and its appeal began to take hold. By 1929, the staid New York Times proclaimed the significance of The Rite to the twentieth century as Beethoven's Ninth is to the nineteenth. The arrival of The Rite in the pantheon of pop culture was clinched in 1940 when it was used in Walt Disney's Fantasia.

At first Stravinsky resisted but ultimately accepted $5,000 for the film rights after being warned that if he didn't consent Disney simply would appropriate the score anyway due to copyright enforcement problems. The composer's reaction was to condemn the soundtrack performance (simplified and rearranged by Leopold Stokowski) as execrable and the associated depiction of a primordial world an unresisting imbecility. But Fantasia served its purpose – from that point on, The Rite has become one of the most popular of all modern scores, recognized and enjoyed by millions throughout the world. Stravinsky's music is an absolutely brilliant component of the ballet, which opens in a wondrous evocation of the first promise of Spring and concludes in vicious human sacrifice. The score ranges from a plaintive folk tune to huge, pounding blows, from placid reverie to grating dissonance, and from bounding grace to irregular metric fragmentation. Stravinsky didn't set out to destroy tradition, but his jagged rhythms, wild harmonies and violent dynamics sidestepped the predicament of tonality and pushed music into a new dimension.

In the process, he gave birth to so much of the music of our time. Nowadays The Rite presents a vexing performance problem – how to restore the original impact. The score was intended to assault audiences with startling freshness, yet listeners now take its innovations for granted and thanks to Fantasia remember the work more as a cartoon soundtrack for dancing dinosaurs than as the bold cornerstone of twentieth century music. In a stunning January 1958 record, Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra restored The Rite to its rightful place in musical history. Bernstein's solution to the problem of historical perspective was brilliant and yet, as so often with artistic triumphs, disarmingly simple. He was well aware that what shocked audiences in 1913 would seem pretty mild stuff two generations later. He couldn't expect audiences to turn back the clock, forget what they knew and participate in an aesthetic masquerade. Nor would he falsify the score by adding more modern elements. There was only one way to jolt contemporary listeners while preserving the integrity of Stravinsky's original conception: to generate a level of energy so intense as to restore the disparity between what the audience expected and what they had to feel.

Bernstein's performance explodes with huge crackling sparks of rough, untamed excitement. But all the frenzied podium gestures in the world would be unavailing without a corresponding contribution from the orchestra. The New York Philharmonic, in most critics' view, had become lazy and unkempt by the late 'fifties, sleepwalking through concerts without challenge. Recently appointed its permanent conductor, Bernstein's hyper baton turned their unruliness to superb advantage, inspiring them to overcome the boredom of professional routine and to convey an urgent sense of creating art afresh. Fully reflecting its conductor's galvanic commitment, the Philharmonic's attacks are razor-sharp, its outbursts perfectly synchronized, its dynamics startlingly precise, and its virtuosity staggering, even in the most complex and difficult passages in which the score abounds. Most amazing of all, the players manage to suggest primordial snarls and shrieks that heighten the raw excitement of Stravinsky's conception. The early stereo engineering provides startlingly vivid sound.

A huge number of spot microphones must have been used, as we seem to crawl inside each of the instruments, and can actually feel the buzz of a vibrating reed, the grip of a rosined bow, the impact of a plucked string, the tense breath on a flute, the biting flatulence of the heavy brass. The very air reverberates with the sounds of primal nature, like an ancient forest pulsing with life. Above it all the percussion section is given extreme prominence, far louder than could be generated in any auditorium, with the tympani in particular tearing the sonic fabric with their harsh blows. This is not the sort of realistic sound to which we have become accustomed nowadays, but Stravinsky's was hardly a natural conception. If the performance is a vibrant dream, its recording is a thrashing hallucination. The all-important rhythm, which pounds home the structure, and the exaggerated presence, which underlines the radical harmonies, grab our attention, pull us inside a terrifyingly intense world and batter us with their overwhelming power. This is classical engineering at its most creative level – using the resources of the studio to enhance the composer's and performers' intentions.

This awesome performance is still available in the 1992 Bernstein Royal Edition (Sony SMK 47629), on a single mid-priced CD that sets the aesthetic perspective by including Stravinsky's previous ballet Petroushka. Accept no substitutes (including the more recent Sony Bernstein Century edition) – all other CDs of Bernstein Rites are of his diffuse 1972 and 1983 remakes with the London Symphony and Israel Philharmonic Orchestras. It took 43 years and dozens of recordings for another to challenge the supercharged Bernstein/Philharmonic Rite (the sheer headstrong scrappy drive of Antal Dorati and the Minneapolis Symphony on Mercury 434 331 perhaps came the closest), but 2001 finally brought Valery Gergiev conducting the Kirov Orchestra (Philips 468 035) to recapture much of its thrill. While his raw ferocity is less gripping than Bernstein's, Gergiev conjures tangible passion with startling precision, revelling in the score's intense color and arresting detail. He even trumps Bernstein's impeccable sense of drama by adding a startling twist to the final chord.

The sound is more natural yet takes full advantage of the main superiority of digital fidelity over analog – capturing the bottom depth of orchestral sound, and especially the reverberation of the bass drum, with astounding power. And while at first the final sacrificial dance seems a bit slow, it grows chilling in its dispassionate relentlessness, as if to deplore from the vantage of our supposedly superior modern morality the routine boredom of death in less civilized times. If you seek an alternative Rite, there's seemingly no need for another less impressive attempt at a dynamic approach, so you'd better go to the opposite extreme with either of the two chillingly precise performances with Pierre Boulez conducting the Cleveland Orchestra in 1968 (on Sony SMK 64109) or 1992 (on DG 435 769). Each leaves me cold, but is accompanied by a superb reading of Petroushka, which benefits enormously from Boulez's objective approach and places the full palette of orchestral color in glorious display. Of incalculable historical value are the pioneering recordings by Monteux and Stravinsky, both cut in Paris in 1929.

A word of warning, though – the Stravinsky records are not by the composer of the Rite. No, I haven't uncovered a fraud. It's indeed Stravinsky who wields the baton, but in the 16 years since the premiere he had undergone a vast change of artistic personality. No longer the wild firebrand who had scandalized musical society, he had converted to neoclassicism, and that's just the type of reading he leads here – dispassionate, manicured and reticent, with the final sacrificial dance downright labored. Even so, despite occasional awkward orchestral balances, Stravinsky does bring out the inner voices and the recording (on Pearl CD 9334) is fairly detailed with a good dynamic range.

(Stravinsky's Columbia remakes with the New York Philharmonic (1940) and Columbia Symphony (1960) are somewhat peppier (and with faster finales) but still fall disappointingly flat in the climaxes and barely offset the bland impression of his first set.) Monteux's competing recording with the Orchestre Straram (on Pearl CD 9329) gives a far better reminiscence of the spirit of the premiere he had conducted. Unfortunately, the sound, even for its time, is poor – heavy compression and indistinct percussion ruin the dynamic excitement; the sixth side is soured by unstable speed; and four of the eight sides were thought to have been cut too loudly for the equipment of the time and so were issued only in lower volume dubbings which further compromise the already deficient fidelity. Even so, most of the instrumental detail is evident and despite some occasional sloppiness, the playing is good and the overall aura is of a rough, vigorous and committed reading.

In any event, this was the very first recording of the Rite by a conductor with matchless credentials (Stravinsky, despite his unimpeachable genius as a composer, never really developed into a great conductor, even of his own work), and although Monteux undoubtedly mellowed somewhat in the intervening years, this is as close as we can come to the authentic feel of the infamous premiere. (Monteux's RCA remakes with the San Francisco Symphony (1945), the Boston Symphony (1951) and the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra (1958) are increasingly nondescript, devoid of energy or character.) 1930 brought yet one more pioneering recording of the Rite – by Leopold Stokowski conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra (BMG 61394). Aside from his notorious Fantasia soundtrack version (heavily reorchestrated and truncated) this would be Stokowski's only recording of a score he introduced to America.

(A planned 1971 Phase Four taping was abandoned when he became ill.) It's a fascinating reading as Stokowski, true as always to his own form, recasts the work as utterly romantic – the accents are expressive, the sound is symphonic and the jagged rhythms are constantly smoothed out – yielding a sense of mainstream Wagnerian drama, as if to form a link with the very tradition Stravinsky railed against! The playing, as would be expected from the Philadelphians, is beautiful, the balances magnificently integrated, and the recording full and rich. The continuous flow among the eight original sides belies the apparent difficulty of the recording, which was spread over eight sessions during nearly a three-year period. Ironically, then, although this is the most conservative of the early Rite recordings, it turns out to be the most perverse and inauthentic. One more recording of historical interest is the 1972 EMI/Angel LP by Michael Tilson Thomas and Ralph Grierson of Stravinsky's two-piano reduction with which he introduced the score to his friends.

His partner on one such occasion in 1912 was none other than Claude Debussy, whose aesthetic could not have been further removed from Stravinsky's, but who proclaimed that it "haunted him like a beautiful nightmare." Although intended for rehearsals rather than public performance, the reduction unwittingly demonstrates the brilliance of Stravinsky's orchestration, which even two keyboards barely suggest. But with all due respect for their significance, these recordings (and all but the recent Gergiev/Kirov that followed) pale beside that stunning 1958 achievement, which preserves a unique convergence of genius – Stravinsky's blazing conception, Bernstein's inspired interpretation, the Philharmonic's gripping execution and Columbia's brilliant engineering.

Copyright 2001 and 2002 by Peter Gutmann Igor Stravinsky — Free listening, videos, concerts, stats and photos at Last.fm composers Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (Russian: Игорь Фёдорович Стравинский ) (17th June 1882 – 6th April 1971) was a Russian composer who first achieved international fame with three ballets commissioned by the impresario Serge Diaghilev and performed by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes (Russian Ballet): L'Oiseau de feu ("The Firebird") (1910), Petrushka (1911), and Le sacre du printemps ("The Rite of Spring") (1913). Stravinsky's compositional career was notable for its stylistic diversity. After his first, Russian (expressionistic), phase he turned in the 1920s to neoclassicism.

The… read more 1000+ images about IGOR STRAVINSKY on Pinterest | Irving penn, Ballet and Conductors Une page du manuscrit original de The Rite of Spring -showing quelques bars de La Sacrifiée danse - de la main de Stravinsky, avec des corrections, des annotations et des gribouillis. #igor stravinsky#rite of spring#le sacre du See More Igor Stravinsky: The Firebird - Classic FM Classic FM Schedule Igor Stravinsky: The Firebird As you listen to the assured, complex ballet music Igor Stravinsky wrote for The Firebird, it’s impressive to think that the composer was only twenty-seven when he created it. While Stravinsky was Russian through and through, Paris was a crucially important city for him: it was here that the highly controversial The Rite of Spring was premiered in 1913. The city had also hosted the premiere performance of The Firebird three years earlier. The job of writing the music for this Diaghilev ballet was never meant to fall to Stravinsky, though.

The first-choice composer was fellow Russian Anatol Liadov, best remembered nowadays for his brooding orchestral piece The Enchanted Lake. Liadov suffered a musical version of writer’s block and was unable to come up with any music that could suitably convey the centuries-old legend of the firebird. So, straight off the subs bench came Stravinsky, eager to make his mark on the Ballets Russes which Diaghilev ran in Paris. The premiere of The Firebird in 1910 cemented Stravinsky’s position as one of the period’s most exciting and dynamic composers, and he was revered by the musical elite of Paris. Today, the ballet remains in rep across the world – and the concert suite is regularly performed, too. Recommended Recording

Question: Who composed 'The Firebird' and 'The Rite of Spring'?
Answer: Igor Stravinsky