All the hallmarks of a great “Rite” were here…
MUSIC REVIEW
A 4-Piano ‘Rite’ With Bang
“Last night i saw this ballet by igor stravinsky on tv,” a friend messaged me late last month, adding how he wished he could see it live. “It was so modern it could have also been performance art.”
My friend had watched the live broadcast of the centenary performance of “The Rite of Spring” from the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris and had detected — without even knowing the words “Rite of Spring” — the extraordinary vitality and, yes, power to shock that remains in Stravinsky’s music and Nijinsky’s reconstructed choreography.
I heard none of the many major orchestral renditions of “Rite” that dotted the past season in observance of its centennial. Finally, on Thursday, I got to hear a four-piano performance of it at Le Poisson Rouge.
A lucid 1981 arrangement of the “Rite” for four pianos by Maarten Bon exists, but Thursday’s performance was of Seann Alderking’s 1997 version, which beefs up the keyboards with percussion, to pretty egregious effect.
The value of “Rite” piano arrangements is their stark focus on the work’s harmonic strangeness and rhythmic sharpness. The orchestra’s volume, dazzling colors and textural variety are stripped away. What’s left is both alarmingly unpredictable and seductively inevitable, the changing moods unfurling in a single long arc from the bassoon’s doleful opening line.
Mr. Alderking’s percussion muddies these waters with bombastic explosions that feel out of scale with, and distract from, the intimate interplay of the pianists. Played here with power and precision by Jared Soldiviero and Matt Smallcomb, the percussion part adds superficial haunted-house excitement — eerie bells, shivery shimmers, sudden crashes — while draining the energy of the main event. It makes the pianos sound small.
Conducted by Erik Ochsner, the music director of the Sonos Chamber Orchestra, which helped sponsor the concert, the performance nevertheless had many pleasures, particularly from its redoubtable pianists — Saar Ahuvia, Stephen Gosling, Stephanie Ho and Jenny Lin — who gained in rhythmic exactitude and focus as the work went on. All the hallmarks of a great “Rite” were here, including the contrast of crashing and soft (as in the otherworldly introduction to the second part) without ever losing a fundamental pulse.
The concert opened with excerpts from piano arrangements of other Stravinsky ballets: the “Danse Infernale” from “The Firebird” (featuring Ms. Lin) and the finale of “Petrushka” (with Mr. Ahuvia and Ms. Ho). Here, free of percussion, these works came through in all their visionary clarity.
Correction: Because of an editing error, a music review on Saturday about a performance of “The Rite of Spring” on four pianos and percussion at Le Poisson Rouge in Manhattan that was conducted by Erik Ochsner misstated part of the name of the group for which he is the music director. It is the Sonos Chamber Orchestra, not the Sonos Music Orchestra.