26th May, 2016
Royal Festival Hall, London, United Kingdom
STRAVINSKY Renard
STRAVINSKY Mavra
STRAVINSKY Les Noces
Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)
Tamara Stefanovich (piano)
Nenad Lečić (piano)
Lorenzo Soulès (piano)
Irina Brown (director)
Louis Price (designer)
Quinny Sacks (choreographer)
Kevin Treacy (lighting designer)
Soloists of the Mariinsky Theatre
Philharmonia Voices
Philharmonia Orchestra
Esa-Pekka Salonen (conductor)
What do Shostakovich, Poulenc, Auric, Barber, Copland, Lukas Foss and Roger Sessions have in common? It turns out, these composers all performed in regional premieres of Stravinsky's strikingly original and explosive choral-cum-ballet work "Les Noces". It is a work that sets four vocal soloists against a choir, four pianos and a fantastic collection of percussion and what you get is 20 minutes of non-stop fireworks. The instrumentation is more economical than "The Rite of Spring" (ahem), but no less sonically barbaric, and you can tell where Bartók got the octave toccatas from in his equally barbaric "First Piano Concerto". It also makes Orff's vocal writing against two pianos in "Court d'amour" of "Carmina burana" sounds like blatant plagiarism. Then there are the non-retrogradable rhythmic cells you find in Messiaen... Anyway. If you grow up listening to the high octane seminal recording with Argerich, Zimerman and Bernstein, tonight's performance with Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Tamara Stefanovich, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and the Philharmonia feels too refined to be mindlessly fun, but the inner workings are much more apparent here and the soloists are top-notched powerful. These 20 minutes alone were worth the effort to sit through the two obscure short operas in the first half, which are not performed often for very good reasons. The pre-"Firebird" "Renard" never really develops, but it was fun to hear the fantastically silly sound of the cimbalom penetrating throughout, and you don't get to see opera singers getting swung around and dragged along on the floor on stage every day. The neo-classical "Mavra" is musically stale and there is only so much invariable rhythms you can take in 20 minutes. The Philharmonia was amazing as always, though I anticipated the performance to be more deafening.
This entry was originally published in my private Instagram account.
