Orchestre de Paris
Part of: Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice, Webcasts on medici.tv, and Carnegie Hall Live on WQXR
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Performers
Orchestre de Paris
Klaus Mäkelä, Music Director and Conductor
Program
ALL-STRAVINSKY PROGRAMThe Firebird
The Rite of Spring
Event Duration
The printed program will last approximately two hours, including one 20-minute intermission. Please note that there will be no late seating before intermission.Listen to Selected Works
This Concert in Context
Igor Stravinsky was perhaps the most famous and widely celebrated composer of the interwar period, owing not least to the wild pre–World War I success of The Firebird in 1910. It would mark the beginning of a close artistic collaboration with impresario Sergei Diaghilev, whose name would become inextricably linked with Stravinsky’s in the years leading up to the war. Pétrouchka—which debuted in June 1911—was likewise warmly received by audiences and enjoyed mostly rave reviews in the Parisian press. Alas, such affection would not last two years later with his work The Rite of Spring. The ballet sparked a riot among some members of a shocked audience, though it remains a matter of some debate whether the outrage stemmed from the music or the stage designer Vaslav Nijinsky’s scandalous choreography, which saw the dancers engage in jerky, twisting movements. As historian Modris Eksteins once wrote, this hysterical reaction presaged dark and violent energies that lay hidden just under the surface of a European civilization that would explode in a world war just one year later.
—Brendan Fay, author of Classical Music in Weimar Germany