Melbourne Reviews

It is an amazing tour de force to perform all three of Stravinsky’s early ballets in the same concert. A tour de force for the conductor, for the orchestral players, and for the audience. The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s program lasted close to three hours, with two intervals, and I was racking my brains trying to remember if I had ever been to any musical event, apart from opera, with two intervals.

But not only, of course, a tour de force of endurance. The complexity of these scores, especially Firebird and The Rite of Spring, is mind-boggling, and many of the players have to negotiate exposed, difficult solos, even instruments unused to solos such as the pair of contrabassoons. The rhythmic complexities of The Rite are famous, and the harmonic language is still, a hundred years after their composition, a challenge for listeners.

It was very interesting to hear all three works in one sitting. Firebird is like a tasting session of almost all the non-Germanic music of the preceding half-century – shadows of Ravel, Debussy, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, and Mussorgsky flit constantly across the score. And in the more violent passages Stravinsky gives us a foretaste of Shostakovich. In the orchestration Stravinsky seems deliberately to try and out-do his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov, whose contribution to orchestration included a re-writing of Berlioz’s famous treatise. It is a work of extremes – extreme depths, opening with just the double basses, and extreme heights, with the piccolos in their upper register – extreme softs, which Martin conjured magically out of nothing, and extreme, violent louds – extreme snarls from muted brass, and extreme lyricism from the violas. This music, combined with the ludicrous plot of the ballet (which of course we had to imagine in this concert performance) made me reflect on the way the dying days of Russia’s Tsarist regime had lost touch with any kind of reality. I have to say, though, that I found the 50 minutes of constantly changing music, nothing ever doing more than getting started, and virtually all based on harmonies derived from the tritone, a trifle wearing.

Petrushka is as different from Firebird as it could be. Composed into the fin de siècle discourse of the sad clown (cf Pierrot Lunaire, Schoenberg’s song cycle of the same year, 1912), this music is a string of parodies, where folksongs and waltzes are almost drowned in the cacophony of the fairground. Simple major key tonalities are disrupted by the clown’s famous bitonality – everything normal is up-ended, and in the end the clown himself emerges from the theatre to insult the audience – his Frères semblables. The MSO’s performance was far from polished, but this is completely in keeping with this work which challenges and even evades most aesthetic norms.

My most recent experience of The Rite of Spring was at the Adelaide Festival earlier this year, where Germaine Acogny’s African dancers revived Pina Bausch’s famous choreography. That performance was to recorded music, so the experience was a sort of mirror image of the MSO’s concert performance without the stage. Conductor Jaime Martin’s was quite an expansive reading of the score, which we have all become familiar with, but the orchestra’s intonation, impeccable in Firebird, occasionally showed the strain of two hours of playing music in all sorts of unfamiliar registers.

Martin, the orchestra’s chief conductor, directed without a baton (except in Petrushka) but with a wide palette of gestures, fully equal both to the wild, almost animal, energy of The Rite and the diaphanous magic of much of Firebird. Solos from all over the orchestra were fresh, exciting, and flawlessly played; among them I would single out the principal oboe in Firebird, where the first half is almost like an oboe concerto, and the pair of clarinets and pair of trumpets in Petrushka, which together personify the clown himself.

The concert was a vast, exhilarating journey through one the the early 20^th century’s most remarkable corpus of works.