* Hungarian Dances yesterday at the St James Theatre Studio was a fabulous experience. A treat, a privilege and a joy to perform with amazing musicians in such a great venue. Huge thanks to everyone concerned! More Hungarian Dances later in the year at the Musical Museum, near Kew Bridge, on Sunday afternoon 8 September and Pen Fro Literary Festival, Pembrokeshire, on 12 September. Watch this space for further dates...
* If you're near a big screen tomorrow, go and see the FREE, live, open-air relay of Mayerling from Covent Garden. It is top ballerina Mara Galeazzi's farewell performance with the Royal Ballet and features Edward Watson as Prince Rudolf. I went to see them both in action in the ROH a couple of weeks ago and emerged utterly wrung out by the combination of intense emotion and astonishing dancing. Is Mayerling the greatest ballet drama ever created? Personally, I think it might be. Don't miss it. Take a brolly if you must, but just don't miss it.
* Please support the ISM's campaign to secure funding for music education beyond 2015. There's a petition to sign, here.
Every little helps, or we hope it does.
* Here's a discussion from Voice of Russia radio that I did last week with Alice Lagnado and John Riley about the lasting importance of The Rite of Spring. The writes, the rights, and sometimes the wrongs too. http://ruvr.co.uk/radio_broadcast/77030634/115272201.html
* And here's a Friday Historical in advance, because I will be otherwise occupied this week: Fritz Kreisler and his cellist brother, Hugo, with pianist Charlton Heath, playing one of my favourite pieces from the Hungarian Dances concert: Kreisler's Marche miniature viennoise. (Did you know Kreisler had a cellist brother? Neither did I. They're a gorgeous team.)
Above, part of the first reconstruction, by the Joffrey Ballet, of the original Rite, choreographed by Nijinsky, designed by Roerich. And here, my article from The Independent (published 12 Feb) telling the story of that first night.
And... today is also Korngold's birthday. He turned 16 on the day the Stravinsky first hit the stage. He was quite a fan of Stravinsky, as it happens - there's a lovely story about when he went to hear Petrouchka and applauded and his father, the music critic Julius Korngold, tried to stop him. The young composer's response to the Rite furore either isn't recorded or hasn't reached my eyes/ears yet. One imagines the ballet might have caused Julius's blood pressure some problems.
It would be so interesting, on the one hand, to rewind the clock, air-lift Julius Korngold out of Erich Wolfgang's personal equation, let the lad study with Schoenberg and hang out with the avant-garde crowd and see how he ended up writing... But on the other hand, if he had done that, would he have come into contact at the crucial moment with Max Reinhardt? It was thanks to Reinhardt that he first went to Hollywood in 1934. He might not have escaped otherwise.
Anyhow, an actual staging of Das Wunder der Heliane has turned up on the Internet, so here is Act I. It's from Brno, with a setting that makes vivid reference to the fact that the opera shared its own year of birth with Fritz Lang's Metropolis. It is conducted by Peter Feranec and directed by Johannes Reitmeier. The second part is available to view on Youtube as well.
On the day the LSO and Valery Gergiev played in Trafalgar Square last spring, the rain stopped and the sun came out. Mostly it rained for four months solid, so this was quite an achievement. Now we've all had enough of the freezing, grey, endless winter that's been engulfing the UK (fyi, it's thought that as 80% of the Arctic ice has melted, it's shifted the Gulf Stream, which used to stop this from happening, so we're stuck with it. Climate change in question? The climate has already changed...).
So we need Gergiev to do something about this, please. Or maybe we need to make a sacrifice PDQ to propitiate Yarilo the sun god (a member of the cabinet would do nicely). For the time being, here is Gergiev with the Mariinsky Ballet in a complete performance of The Rite of Spring, with the original choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky and designs by Nicholas Roerich. It'll warm up your computer, if nothing else.
Meanwhile, I am confined to my Sarah Lund sweater. Hope they don't mind
if I wear it to the Coliseum tonight to see Osipova and Vasiliev dance Giselle.
(OK, OK, I promise I'm never, ever going to say again that I'm on holiday and won't blog for a week. Apologies for typos in the past few posts - I was working on a shiny-screened laptop in brilliant Egyptian sunshine....... Now back. Bit chilly here, i'n't it?)
My birthday tribute to The Rite of Spring - a piece of music without which my life might have been very different - is out in today's Independent. (Own obligatory book plug here.) Below, please find the director's cut.First, here's a fascinating interview with Monica Mason, Kenneth MacMillan's original Chosen Maiden, about the making of his version, with extracts of dancing from the amazing Ed Watson, the most recent male Chosen One at Covent Garden, among others.
Speaking
recently at the first night of the Southbank Centre’s year-long festival of 20th
and 21st-century music, The
Rest is Noise, the artistic director Jude Kelly termed this era “the age of
violence”. And in 1913 The Rite of Spring
was indubitably the most violent music the world had yet heard. Harmony is
slashed, cubic, multilayered. Often the orchestra effectively plays in two keys
at once. Melody, when it is present at all, is fragmentary, suggesting the
ambience and contours of folk songs. Rhythm drives the whole thing, but those
rhythms – elemental, driven, clashing – are anything but predictable, throwing
the listener about like a runaway train. Stravinsky sets up a pattern only in
order to shatter it. It has been suggested that the work contains “a touch of
sadism”.
The ballet’s
story is indeed cruel. An imaginary ancient tribe sacrifices a young virgin to
propitiate the god of spring. We are hapless witnesses as the Chosen Maiden is
selected, glorified, then forced to dance herself to death. It is a gut-wrenching
idea that could seem almost to tap into a primitive bloodlust. Whether or not
that was deliberate on Stravinsky’s part, or Nijinsky’s, is something we’ll
probably never know.
Stravinsky
claimed that he had the idea for the ballet in a “fleeting vision”. But someone
else needs to receive more credit for dreaming it up: the ballet’s
designer, the Russian artist and philosopher Nicholas Roerich, who was far more
deeply engaged with matters of folklore – besides Theosophy and occult
mysticism – than the composer himself. Stravinsky’s earlier ballets drew on
fairy stories and Russian folk music, but the wellsprings of horror that underlie
The Rite are never fully present. Stravinsky
certainly developed the scenario in collaboration with Roerich, and later the
artist was furious to see his crucial role in its creation downgraded while the
composer hogged the glory.
Not that
there was much of that to be had from the hissing and cat-calling on the first
night. The protest broke out shortly after curtain-up. Stravinsky fled the
auditorium and observed the rest of the performance from backstage: “I have
never again been that angry,” he recalled. Serge Diaghilev – the impresario
behind the Ballets russes de Monte Carlo, responsible for commissioning all
concerned – was nevertheless rather satisfied with the outcome. Even then,
there was no such thing as bad publicity.
The “riot
at The Rite” has been the subject of
endless scrutiny. Doubt has been cast on whether it really amounted to a riot at
all; noise, yes, but fist-fights, probably not, though around 40 people are
said to have been thrown out of the theatre. In all likelihood the disapprobation
was directed at Nijinsky’s eccentric and ungainly choreography, rather than
Stravinsky’s efforts; after all, with so much noise, the music was scarcely audible.
Commentators have pointed to all manner of issues at stake that night, from a
faction in attendance that was loyal to Diaghilev’s better-established
choreographer, Mikhail Fokine, to the sensitivities of a French audience
beleaguered by the tense atmosphere that prefigured World War I. But some
composers who heard it were not happy either; Puccini attended on the second
night and dubbed it the work of “a madman”.
Stravinsky
emerged from the fracas dispirited; he feared that the hostile reception would
shatter the momentum he had achieved following enthusiastic responses to his first two ballets, The Firebird (1910)
and Petrushka (1911). But just under a
year later, The Rite was rescued when
the conductor Pierre Monteux championed it at the Casino de Paris, purely as a
concert piece. Allowed to stand or fall on its musical merits, The Rite rose triumphant.
Today The Rite of Spring has achieved a
popularity that Stravinsky could only have dreamed of on that notorious first night.
It is a tribute to him that even after a century in which every traditional parameter
of music – tonality, rhythm, melody, sonority – has been subverted or
destroyed, this work has lost none of its power. In a year dominated to excess
by composers’ anniversaries – Wagner, Verdi and Britten – The Rite, only about half an hour long, is enjoying a similar
celebration in its own right.
If
anything, its power has increased with familiarity (no doubt helped along when
Disney animated it with volcanoes and dinosaurs in Fantasia). It is a concert staple, a modern classic. Last year the
London Symphony Orchestra and the conductor Valery Gergiev performed it in
Trafalgar Square; a 10,000-strong audience turned out to cheer it on. In the
theatre, numerous choreographers have turned their hand to its
reinterpretation, from Kenneth MacMillan’s geometric marvels to the
heartbreaking terror of Pina Bausch’s version for her Tanztheater Wuppertal.
Wagner’s
opera changed the face of music when later composers fell under the spell of
its harmonic language; but its eroticism scandalised many listeners. Clara
Schumann wrote: “It was the most repulsive thing...To be forced to see and
listen to such sexual frenzy the whole evening, in which every feeling of
decency is violated …I endured it to the end since I wanted to hear the whole
lot!”
Strauss
amplified Oscar Wilde’s play about the lust-maddened princess and her demand for
the head of John the Baptist with music that mixed sensual beauty with
claustrophobic and violent excess. Salome’s final scena over the severed head culminates in a chord that encapsulates
her depravity so thoroughly that tracts have been written about this moment
alone. The opera was banned in London for its first two years. Strauss set out
to shock – and succeeded.
Arnold Schoenberg: String Quartet
No.2 (1908)
“I feel
wind from other planets,” runs the Stefan George poem that Schoenberg set for
soprano and string quartet in this ground-breaking work. So did its audience.
The planet in question was the final movement’s experiment in “atonality”: a
piece written without any tonal centre, giving an impression of floating,
unrooted dissonance that exists for its own sake rather than for its relativity.
More than a century later, the effect still sounds radical.
John Adams: The Death of Klinghoffer (1991)
Based on
the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro by Palestinian terrorists,
Adams’s opera fell foul of ferocious international sensitivities. Planned
productions were cancelled and some responses expressed horror that the work
should dare to portray the emotions of characters on both sides. After 9/11, an
article in the New York Times accused
it of “romanticizing terrorism”. Its UK stage premiere finally took place at
English National Opera last year, to considerable acclaim.
It won't have escaped the notice of canny JDCMB fans that 2013 marks the 100th anniversary of Stravinsky's seismic ballet score, Le sacre du printemps, or The Rite of Spring [above: dancers of the Ballets Russes in the original version].
A special website has been set up for the occasion by the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill: https://www.theriteofspringat100.org/ One section is 'Spring Encounters: Reflections on the Rite', and for this Will Robin asked me to contribute a post about my own relationship with the music.
It so happens that the ballet score inadvertently inspired my first novel, which was called, er, Rites of Spring. (Book plug: paperback here,Kindle edition here.) So I wrote about how and why, and what it tells us about the ballet, the music and life today. Here's the link to the piece.
* Hungarian Dances yesterday at the St James Theatre Studio was a fabulous experience. A treat, a privilege and a joy to perform with amazing musicians in such a great venue. Huge thanks to everyone concerned! More Hungarian Dances later in the year at the Musical Museum, near Kew Bridge, on Sunday afternoon 8 September and Pen Fro Literary Festival, Pembrokeshire, on 12 September. Watch this space for further dates...
