Les Noces

Stravinsky's choral ballet Les noces (The Wedding) radiates life-affirming joy and energy. In four continuous scenes, it depicts a Russian village wedding, with solo voices and chorus switching between multiple parts—the bride and her mother, the groom and his relatives, and the increasingly inebriated guests at the feast—accompanied by four pianos and percussion ensemble. When premiered in Paris in 1923 by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company, Les noces had been through the longest gestation of any of Stravinsky’s major works. The idea of a ballet derived from Russian folksong, to be both sung and danced, had occurred to the composer as far back as 1913. Stravinsky completed the music during the First World War while living in Switzerland, but then took some time to decide on its instrumentation. He first opted for an ensemble of wind and string instruments, plus the tangy sound of a cimbalom (an East European folk instrument, resembling a zither struck with spoon-shaped mallets). Dissatisfied, he started reworking the music for two cimbaloms, pianola, harmonium and percussion, before abandoning this version after the first two scenes. Finally, he settled on four pianos and percussion. The result is a brilliant fusion of timeless folk-music tradition and vibrant rhythmic modernism. In its closing section, the feast’s hectic activity gives way to the groom’s song in praise of his bride, accompanied by chiming chords on bells and the four pianos—one of the great moments in Stravinsky’s music.