Stravinsky Festival – Rite of Spring

Igor Stravinsky’s ballet the Rite of Spring premiered in 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. It stirred up a mighty scandal. The audience booed, and everyone was upset. Stravinsky himself was upset by the uproar. “I left the auditorium as chaos began to break out in earnest,” he said in one of the famous interviews with Robert Craft.

Today, the Rite of Spring is one of the twentieth century’s most frequently played and beloved works. It is a milestone of western music history, a piece that is incredibly complex, and yet still so directly effective. Attending a live performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring is an extraordinary musical experience!

This concert will also feature an exclusive performance of Funeral Song, Opus 5. The score disappeared after the first performance in 1909, but was recently discovered after over one hundred years at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. Stravinsky composed the music in memory of his teacher, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. In his memoires, Stravinsky writes that “it was the best thing I wrote before the Firebird.” This sorrowful music had its modern “premiere performance” as recently as 2016, and is now being performed in Sweden for the first time.

We will also hear internationally acclaimed Finnish violinist Elina Vähälä take on Stravinsky’s neoclassical and playfully melodic Violin Concerto, in which each movement begins with a sharp chord as if to say: Listen up – it’s starting now!