#rite of spring
Ok, so I tried out for the Gotham Orchestra and lemme just say, a good half of the orchestra are a tad of snooty rich folks and the other half are some students or some chill folk.
Not as bad as I expected, although the bd (band director) clearly favours the richer players. (They all gettin first and main parts.) Although, I ain’t complaining. I honestly don’t mind playing second or third Clarinet. Second and Third is almost as important as first as Uncle Clerry’s said. Ur adding more layers to the melody, evening it out and balancing with harmony.
The bd said we finna do Swan Lake because the Gotham ballet company is planning to do it. But other then that, he said we might do Rite of Spring.
and THIS is where i attempted to imitate the style of Leon Bakst to make a faux rite of spring poster :)
Valentine Gross-Hugo’s sketches of Nijinsky’s choreography for the Sacrificial DancefromThe Rite of Spring, 1913.
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Pastel drawing by Valentine Gross-Hugo showing a moment from the end of the first scene of Le Sacre du Printemps, 1913.
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Caricature drawing of Igor Stravinsky playing the music for The Rite of Spring. Jean Cocteau, 1913.
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Igor Stravinsky with his children Milene, Soulima, and Theodore. Clarens, Switzerland c. 1913.
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Kiss the Earth - Sketches of a set design for the ballet Le Sacre du Printemps. Nicholas Roerich, 1912.
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Photo of a group of supporters and members of the Ballets Russes taken by one of its founders, Nicolas Besobrasov. From left to right, ? Botkine, Pavel Koribut-Kubitovitch, Tamara Karsavina, Vaslav Nijinsky, Igor Stravinsky, Alexandre Benois, Sergei Diaghilev, ? Botkine. Front, Alexandra Vassilieva. Beausoleil, c. 1912.
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Cropped photo of Nijinsky’s sacrificial dancers.Dame Marie Rambert (1888-1982) is on the left.
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Nijinsky’s “knock-kneed Lolitas” of Le Sacre. Costume and set design by Nicholas Roerich. 1913.
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On Sunday afternoon of June 2nd, 1912, the influential French critic Louis Laloy invited Debussy, his wife, and Stravinsky to his home for a private reading of the first part of the not-quite-finished score for Le Sacre du Printemps. Laloy recalled the event in his memoirs:
“Debussy agreed to play the bass. Stravinsky asked if he could take his collar off. His sight was not improved by his glasses, and pointing his nose to the keyboard and sometimes humming a part that had been omitted from the arrangement, he led into a welter of sound the supple, agile hands of his friend. Debussy followed without a hitch and seemed to make light of the difficulty. When they had finished there was no question of embracing, nor even of compliments. We were dumbfounded, overwhelmed by this hurricane which had come from the depths of the ages and which had taken life by the roots.”
Igor Stravinsky and Claude Debussy in the latter’s apartment in the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, Paris; photo by Erik Satie, June 1910. Stravinsky and Debussy performed a four-hand piano arrangement of Part I of The Rite of Spring for a private audience in June of 1912.
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Camille Saint-Saëns performing Mozart at the Salle Gaveau, Pierre Monteux conducting—Paris, November 5th, 1913.
Earlier that year, Saint-Saëns was awarded France’s highest order, the Grand-Croix de la Légion d'honneur. It has often been recounted that Saint-Saëns stormed out of the première of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring on 29 May 1913, infuriated over what he considered the misuse of the bassoon in the ballet’s opening bars. In fact, according to Stravinsky, he was not present on that occasion, but did walk out of the first concert performance of the score, conducted by Pierre Monteux in April 1914; Saint-Saëns remarked that Stravinsky was “mad”.
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Jean Cocteau in 1909, the year he met Sergei Diaghilev, who encouraged him to venture into the genre of ballet. Cocteau wrote the story for Le Dieu bleu which premiered in May of 1912. A year later, he was in attendance at the premiere of The RIte of Spring, and remarked, rather scathingly, of the crowd “the smart audience in tails and tulle, diamonds and ospreys, was interspersed with the suits and bandeaux of the aesthetic crowd. The latter would applaud novelty simply to show their contempt for the people in the boxes… Innumerable shades of snobbery, super-snobbery and inverted snobbery were represented.”
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Gabriel Astruc, French journalist, agent, promoter, theatre manager, theatrical impresario and founder of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, where the first performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring was staged in 1913.
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Ballets Russes conductor, Pierre Monteux, posing with crabs. (I really wish I knew the story behind this photo.)
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