Today’s the day the Gergiev Festival starts, and over the last few days the house has been awash with music from the pieces D. has to perform. One of these is the Sacre by Stravinsky, in a concertante rendition of course, not as a ballet. “Scenes from Russian pagan life” the composer titled it. Apparently he got the idea for the piece from a book his wife was reading at the time, on an archeological dig in the Ukraine. I always like to remind people who so dearly want to resurrect a golden age of European paganism, that this most likely includes human sacrifice and cannibalism. Sacre pointed to that European heritage and that was part of its shock value. The other part of this shock is, of course, the music. Stravinsky makes an entire symphonic orchestra sound as though it is one monstrous percussion instrument. There is always a tension in his music (at least that’s how he saw the piano) between the strings as lyrical or as percussion. Sacre is squarely on the side of percussion.
There’s been a reconstruction of the original ballet, that of Ballets Russes, a reconstruction that seems to have derived a lot of its material from Gurdjieff’s “movements”. Now that D. has listened to and watched every version there is on youtube, Pina Bausch’s ballet seems to be the winner.
Note: that last link has the horribly difficult clarinet solo in it that has been a constant in our house these last few days.