Beyond "The Rite of Spring"

Yesterday was the official 100th Birthday of Stravinsky's notorious ballet, The Rite of Spring.  It created controversy right from its first performance, both for its jagged rhythmic patterns and for its extremely dissonant harmonies.  And then there was the choreography....

If you're a lover of The Rite of Spring and want to hear more Stravinsky along the same lines -- it's not easy.  Stravinsky was something of a musical chameleon, continually evolving and reinventing himself and his composing style.  But there is one later ballet which may fill the bill, and is definitely worth checking out for its different but equally unique musical substance.

That is The Wedding, more often called by its French name, Les Noces.  This work, premiered in 1923, uses a similar rugged musical style to The Rite, but with folk-inflected melodies more to the fore.  It also adds singers to the ensemble -- four soloists and a small choir.  Stravinsky tried many different combinations of instruments for this piece, but finally settled on the undeniably unique sound of four pianos and a large number of percussionists.

It seems that the composer wanted to make more of an impersonal comment on the wedding rituals than a personally involving account -- and the monochromatic sounds of piano and percussion "...would fulfil all my conditions.  It would be at the same time perfectly homogeneous, perfectly impersonal, and perfectly mechanical."

The result is like no other piece of music I have ever heard -- glittering, hard-edged, brittle, and full of unique and intriguing sound combinations.  This may sound like a tough nut, but in performance it is much more captivating than you might suspect.  And that's how I first heard it, years ago at a Toronto Symphony concert.

The recording I have is a classic by Leonard Bernstein for DGG.  The playing time is not long for a CD (Les Noces lasts for 24 minutes, the accompanying Mass for 20) but it's reasonable value at a reissue price if you can find a copy.  Both works are given what I would describe as definitive performances.

The Mass, by the way, inhabits a completely different sound world.  Completed in 1948, designed for liturgical use, and based (remotely) on Gregorian chant, the music has an austere and dignified beauty all its own.  Again, the scoring is unusual -- choir and soloists accompanied by an ensemble of ten winds and brass.  Here you can experience for yourself two wildly contrasting facets of Stravinsky's musical personality.