Leonard Bernstein leads the London Symphony Orchestra. He called Stravinsky's famously savage Rite of Spring "extremely tuneful and dancy, rhythmically seductive, beguiling."
If you think all the twitchy rhythms and random shards of melody flashing through Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring sound complicated, consider the poor musicians who have to learn it. And then there's the conductor, who needs to perfectly place every piccolo tweet and bass drum boom.
An image from the 2013 production of Le Sacre du Printemps by the Joffrey Ballet, Chicago, reflects the hard jumps and stamps of Vaslav Nijinsky's original choreography.
Credit Keystone-France / Getty Images
Dancers in folkloric costumes, moving unpredictably to pounding chords, characterized the 1913 Rite of Spring premiere at Paris' Champs Elysées Theater.
One hundred years ago this week, a ballet premiered that changed the art world. Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps — The Rite of Spring — was first seen by the public on May 29, 1913, in Paris. As the orchestra played TheRite's swirling introduction, the audience at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées began to murmur. Then the curtain opened.
Overmountain Men makes its first appearance on Mountain Stage, recorded live at the Culture Center Theater in Charleston, W.Va. Taking its name from the soldiers of the American Revolution who lived west of (or "over") the Appalachians, Overmountain Men began as a collaboration between North Carolina singer, songwriter and attorney David Childers and Avett Brothers bassist Bob Crawford. Crawford had written a song about a real-life prison rodeo for a documentary, and sought out Childers to sing it.
Please listen in for the forthcoming edition of All This Jazz, which happens Saturday the 25th here on Public Radio 89.5-1, from 10pm till midnight. Our show delivers modern jazz, both recent and classic --- "all killer, no filler," like the poet said --- and there's always a next-day re-broadcast of ATJ on Sunday at 7pm on Jazz 89.5-2, which is our station's all-jazz HD Radio channel.
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Pablo Helguera is a New York-based artist working with sculpture, drawing, photography and performance. His new book isHelguera's Artunes. You can see more of his work atArtworld Salon and on his own site.
As the 100th anniversary of Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring approaches, commentator Miles Hoffman reminds us that — as earthshaking as that infamous debut was — the composer soon branched out into a variety of musical styles that would surprise his fans and critics.
When Duke Ellington received the news that Billy Strayhorn, his songwriting and arranging partner of 28 years, had died, Ellington reportedly cried and told a friend, "No, I'm not all right! Nothing is going to be all right now."
