Skip to main content

The Rite of Spring: the work that let musical imaginations run riot

Stravinsky’s savage masterpiece was lauded by jazz musicians, inspired countless film scores – and made Disney dinosaurs dance. What would music be without it?

There is a story that Igor Stravinsky went to the New York jazz club Birdland one evening in 1951. Whispers went round that the great composer was in the house. When Charlie Parker came on with his quintet, he didn’t acknowledge Stravinsky in person, but seamlessly quoted The Firebird in his first number, the furiously fast Ko-Ko. Stravinsky was so delighted that he banged his glass on the table, spilling its contents on the people at the table behind. Parker’s musical quote could just as easily have been The Rite of Spring; two years earlier, in Paris, he’d quoted the opening bassoon melody in his solo on Salt Peanuts, acknowledging that he was in the city that gave birth to The Rite at its scandalous premiere in 1913.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Vm17Lt
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more

Elena Ferrante: ‘Solaris is not Tarkovsky’s best film, but it made the greatest impression on me’

Solaris is astonishing because the book that inspired it doesn’t seem to contain Tarkovsky’s film A film that I watch at least once a year is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris . I’ve loved all of Tarkovsky’s works, even the most difficult. Some I’ve seen in the cinema, others on television. I saw Andrei Rublev at the cinema, and on the big screen it was astonishing, its black-and-white extraordinary: I’ll probably never see it again in a cinema, but I hope that young people will have the opportunity. I also saw Solaris on the big screen – not Tarkovsky’s best film, but the one that made the greatest impression on me. I remember that it was advertised as the Soviet answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey – a completely misleading slogan. To see in it a cinematic contest between the US and the USSR was as silly as it was misleading. Kubrick’s marvellous film, with its imaginative force, would certainly win. But it doesn’t have even a hint of the desperation, of the sense of loss, that dominates Sol...
Post a Comment
Read more