Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring

It was impresario Serge Diaghilev who commissioned a ballet inspired by the rituals of prehistoric Russia; and the star of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Vaslav Nijinsky, who first put Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) on stage in Paris on May 29, 1913. But it was Stravinsky’s music that made the most enduring impact: a 35-minute controlled explosion for a huge orchestra whose rawness, originality, and primal rhythmic power would redefine modern music. It’s hard to overstate the impact of The Rite: a liberation of dissonance and rhythm in a score of such electrifying difficulty that few conductors—or orchestras—have been able to resist its challenge. Esa-Pekka Salonen first recorded it in 1990. Now, with the San Francisco Symphony, he aims to reaffirm the score’s wildness and danger. “It used to be a scary monster,” he tells Apple Music Classical. “It was such a wild beast.” “The San Francisco Symphony has a very strong tradition with Stravinsky, starting with Pierre Monteux,” he points out: Monteux, who conducted the explosive premiere of The Rite in 1913, would later become chief conductor of the SFS. Now it’s Salonen’s turn to reawaken that latent power. “The Rite of Spring must never be a mere showpiece,” he says. “I’ll never stop trying to find the menace and the glorious primitivism in this score.”