KPO Photo
The string quartet Brooklyn Rider, singer-songwriter Shara Worden (in checkered shirt), and Dance Heginbotham perform a new work inspired by the Rite of Spring during “The Rite of Spring at 100,” Carolina Performing Arts’ season-long exploration of The Rite of Spring. Below: Emil Kang, organizer of “The Rite of Spring at 100.”
premiere in 1913. At 100, the score is being tackled anew Does it still have the power to shock? orous 1913 evening, Stravinsky’s explosive paean to pagan Russian rituals and the sacrifice of a virgin has given rise this year to a spate of creativity and symposia. The global champion in this regard is The Rite of Spring at 100 at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. The season-long celebration, presented by Carolina Performing Arts, includes scholarly conferences in Chapel Hill and at Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Conservatory, and the world and U.S. premieres of eleven commissioned instrumental and dance works by major composers and choreographers featuring noted artists, ensembles, and dance companies. The Carolina menu includes one traditional glimpse into the lore of the Rite— dance historian Millicent Hodson’s 1987 reconstruction of the original 1913 production for Joffrey Ballet. Carolina’s emphasis on the new has yielded a dancetheater piece by Bill T. Jones and Anne Bogart; a Marc-André Dalbavie work for mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená and pianist Yefim Bronfman; music by Colin Jacobsen, Shara Worden, John Zorn, and Gabriel Kahane for the string quartet Brooklyn Rider; a score for the International Contemporary Ensemble by Tyshawn Sorey, a jazz composer and
multi-instrumentalist; and a collaboration between choreographer Medhi Walerski and composer Joby Talbot for Netherlands Dance Theater. Emil J. Kang is executive director for the arts at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and organizer of The Rite of Spring at 100; he is also a former Fellow in the League of American Orchestras’ Orchestra Management Fellowship Program. Kang says his diverse programs focus on the impact and inspiration of the seminal score. “What we didn’t want to do was just rehash the work,” says Kang. “I wanted artists to look at Rite of Spring as a metaphor.” Rite fever doesn’t end with live events. Listeners who enjoy comparing Sacres can bask in Decca’s 100th Anniversary Collector’s Edition of four discs containing all 38 recordings of the work on the Decca, Deutsche Grammophon, and Philips labels made from 1946 to 2010. Two recent films available on DVD, Riot at the Rite (2005) and Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (2009), present outlandish, if entertain-
ing, depictions of the work’s premiere. Perhaps the most unforgettable Sacre rendition of them all is Walt Disney’s 1940 animated Fantasia, with its striking, often frightening sequences that use portions of the score to depict the creation of the world and the evolution and extinction of dinosaurs. And then there’s the irreverent record label Blue Music Group, which has gone satirical by commissioning what it fantasizes to be an authentic replica “of the 1913 eggs used in the premiere performance” that will be “available in Paris during the 2013 centennial celebration, aimed at arts-hungry Parisians.” All these activities signal an abiding hunger to hail the work and reconsider the mystique that continues to surround Stravinsky’s singular achievement. “No doubt it will be understood one day that I sprang a surprise on Paris, and Paris was disconcerted,” the composer told a reporter a few days after the premiere. “But it will soon forget its bad temper.” How prescient Stravinsky was.
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