Yesterday evening, I went to Carnegie Hall to hear the first concert of the season, an Opening Night program that focused on two wildly different dance pieces from the early twentieth century, one by Ravel and the other by Stravinsky, both of them sharing a connection with Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes.
The evening began with Ravel's La Valse. Though the piece was originally conceived as a tribute to Johann Strauss and the gaiety of pre-war Vienna, it took on another meaning - no matter how vehemently Ravel may have denied it - when the work finally came to be written in 1919 at a time when Europe was still reeling from the cataclysmic effects of four years of war. The halcyon days of the Belle Époque that had initially inspired the work seemed impossibly distant from this new vantage point and were looked back upon not so much with nostalgia as with a sense they had all along been unreal, a veneer thinly covering the strife and discontent that were eventually to rise to the surface and plunge the continent into four years of madness. Though the piece, which in actuality contains a series of waltzes, begins pleasantly enough, a sense of something not quite right soon makes itself felt, and the work ends with a death-like coda that sounds as if a music box had burst a spring and ended on a false note.
It was La Valse that ended Ravel's association with the Ballets Russes. Although Diaghiliev admitted the work was a masterpiece, he then went on to claim that it was not a ballet but "a portrait of ballet." Ravel was understandably insulted and broke off all contact with the impresario. So upset was the composer that when he met Diaghilev again years later he wouldn't even shake his hand, an act that led the latter to challenge him to a duel. One can't blame Ravel for his indignation. This was one of his finest creations and even today one of his most popular works.
So fixed a place in the repertoire has Le Sacre du printemps now attained that it's difficult to believe it could once have been as controversial as its history suggests. Everyone knows the story of the infamous 1913 premiere at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées that ended in a riot, though there were those who claimed at the time that this was a response to Nijinsky's choreography rather than Stravinsky's music. (Years ago I saw a recreation of the original production staged by the Joffrey Ballet and thought it magnificent.) What can't be denied, however, is that this was one of the earliest triumphs of modernism no matter that it had its roots firmly in the Russian folk tradition. Even now, despite its familiarity, there is something deeply unsettling in the savage rhythms that burst out of nowhere and challenge the sensibilities of the audience. There are very few other works in the repertoire so gripping as this. As for the orchestra's interpretation here, I thought it too polished for my taste. There was little in evidence of the primeval Russian energy that infuses Stravinsky's music.
I had seen Gustavo Dudamel conduct for the first time last season when he led the L.A. Philharmonic in a performance of Mahler No. 3 and had been suitably impressed. It was one of the few occasions on which I'd witnessed a performer actually live up to the hype he'd received in the media. He really was that good. At this concert I had an opportunity to hear him with his other orchestra, the Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar. Together they showed themselves to be a world class ensemble fully the equal of any European orchestra.
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