It Was All Riot On The Night

I would guess that most of you found all but one of those fairly easy. Even if the exact date didn’t give it away, the year itself would. For those who want to check, the answers are at the bottom of this review.

The event promised to be a pleasant evening out at the ballet at the Champs-Elysees Theatre in Paris. A young composer, Igor Stravinsky, already popular through his ballet music for The Firebird and Petrouchka, had written a new ballet, Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring.). The great Ballets Russes, formed four years earlier by Sergei Diaghilev, was to perform the ballet and a large audience turned up, looking forward no doubt to a charming, colourful spectacle and to some wonderful Russian music. Stravinsky had, after all, been a pupil of the great Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, a composer of highly colourful music including Sheherazade and The Flight of the Bumblebee. And young Igor Stravinsky had been his most gifted student.

Many prominent figures from the world of music were there, including Camille (“Carnival of the Animals”) Saint-Saens, Maurice (“Bolero”) Ravel and Claude (“Claire de Lune”) Debussy.

But from the opening bars of the music, played in an unexpectedly high register by a solo bassoon, many of the audience became outraged. Saint-Saens stormed out, furious about the “misuse” of the bassoon. As the music’s barbarous qualities became evident and the Pagan nature of the ballet’s story began to emerge, it became obvious that this was not the genteel evening starring delicate ballerinas in tutus that ballet-lovers had been expecting.

The wonder is that the conductor, Pierre Monteux, and the orchestra didn’t give up. And one also wonders how some of the audience managed to remain enthralled by what they were hearing given the noise of a large number of angry rioters. Yet one man reported afterwards how he was so captivated by the music that it took him some time to realise that the pain in his head was caused by the man behind him pounding out the rhythms on it with his fists.

In the nineteenth and century, melody and harmony dominated. Rhythm was there, of course, to give the music its “pulse.” A waltz would have its own distinctive rhythmic pattern, as would a march but the melody was what most people heard. What Stravinsky did was to set rhythm free: it became the dominating influence in the music. He used melody in “The Rite of Spring,” distorted versions of Russian folk songs; and he used harmony – often excruciatingly dissonant, jarring to the ears that first heard them. But above all were the relentless, driving rhythms, the jagged, pounding beats that were constantly shifting so that you could never get a grip on where it was going. Trying to tap your feet in time to it became an impossibility.

The music opens, as mentioned already, with a melody played in an almost impossibly high register on the bassoon. This melody was once a Russian folksong but it has been distorted almost beyond recognition. Gradually, other instruments join in, each seeming to play a line unconnected with what the others are playing. As the music grows in complexity it begins to sound like the calls of jungle animals and birds. Searching for a “beat” to the music is almost impossible – there is just a great swirling mass of noise.

The music becomes quite mechanistic and it seems as though in its forward momentum it is going to become regular in rhythm; but again Stravinsky has a shock in store: as quickly as we adjust to one block of sound, he gives us something new and unrelated. There is a short quiet passage, dragging itself along almost melodically; then with a huge crash from the tamtam (a sort of enormous hanging cymbal – think of the start of the old J.Arthur Rank movies) this music becomes loud and tortured in its dissonance. It is replaced by yet more wild dancing, which is cut short within seconds as a mysterious, trilled passage is played by the woodwind; and this in turn is swept away by a percussive dance, the Games of the Rival Tribes. This is interrupted by huge brass fanfares and out of step drums as the Elders arrive.

************ This Disc *************

************* The Boring Bits ***************

The BBC recently compared all currently available recordings of the Rite and chose as the most exciting and best-played a version by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra conducted by Yoel Levi. This is on the Telarc label, number CD80266 and costs£13.99 from Amazon. The coupling is another Stravinsky masterpiece, Pulcinella, in which he reworked pieces by the 17th century composer Pergolesi. It’s a very attractive work indeed, a perfect foil for its violent companion work.