The Rite of Spring

[kongming819]

I think his Romeo and Juliet is excellent however (Prokofiev, that is, not Tchaikovsky)

Anyway, I want to get Robert Craft's recording...have you heard it?

[sbeckmesser]

Page 67 of the latest (September 2009) issue of the BBC Music Magazine contains the best news a lover of the Rite could have hoped for: finally a DVD and Blu-ray HD version of the ballet in its original choreography by Nijinsky. It is being issued by BelAir Classiques and features the Mariinsky Orchestra and Ballet conducted by Gergiev (there's also a Firebird with its original chroeography by Fokine). I was lucky to see the both a live performance of the Rite choreography (reconstructed by Millicent Hodgson) by the Joffrey Ballet and a broadcast of that production on PBS many years ago. Both were revelations, even to someone who knows the score very well. Nijinsky's stunningly modern 1913 original choreography makes strikingly visible and visceral many aspects of the music that are hard to eke out even when reading a score while listening to a recording, particularly the frequent use of multiple simultaneous different rhythmic patterns. And, among other things, it makes sense of the otherwise seemingly puzzling, unmotivated and otherwise arch-romantic molto allargando the bar before [117]. This will be a must-view for any fan of the Rite. It will spoil you for anybody else's choreography.

--Sixtus

[daphnis]

I'll definitely have to check this out. I really hope they'll make a conscientious effort with this reconstruction to actually pay attention to the score rather than just the choreography like the Joffrey reconstruction did. As revolutionary as it was for me to see, I was shocked that the music was completely overlooked and not one word mentioned about it in the interviews with Hodgson.

[sbeckmesser]

Hodgson wrote a fascinating book about the reconstruction and its all about the music, as seen through the body of a choreographer, in this case Nijinsky channeled through Hodgson. There are more than enough books and essays on the Rite as pure music (accountings of its octotonic, pentatonic and other exotic scales, polytonality and folk-song-derived melodies etc. ad nauseum) and hardly any on it as a theatrical experience. Regardless of its musical construction, the Rite tells a story and the reconstruction of Nijinsky's storytelling is the value of Hodgson's work, aside from its merits on dance criteria alone, which are considerable (Nijinsky was a genius, after all). Besides, Nijinsky's choreography does indeed "show" more of what is going on deep within the music -- and the story -- than other, more recent attempts that I have seen (such as the sorry attempt by the MET Opera in their otherwise marvelous "Stravinsky Triple Bill").

Extended aside: Dancers seem to think of music in differently than, say, orchestral musicians. Since the entire body is involved, everything to a dancer is kinetics and physics and how to combine the two to create phrases and gestures in space. It's somewhat ironic that musicians now have appropriated and overused the latter term, to the extent that a musical "gesture" has become a cliche (e.g. "the symphony's opening gesture blah blah blah").

--Sixtus

PS: There's already a DVD of Stravinsky's Les Noces with the original choreography by Nijinsky's sister. It too is a must view for those who dearly love the piece. The choreography zeros in on the intensely emotional core of this otherwise seemly cold and musically almost mechanistic work and it heightens immensely the contents of the words.

PPS: Those interested in the theatrical experience of the Rite's notorious first-night are directed to the relevant section (the best extended account I've seen in English) in Thomas Kelly's excellent First Nights available in paperback from Yale UP.