On the first full day of spring, while the season is still prone to brutal mood swings, it’s a good time to revisit this Joffrey Ballet restoration of the original 1913 production of Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du printemps” (“The Rite of Spring”). The savagery of the scenario – to appease the gods, a prehistoric Slavic tribe elects a maiden to dance herself to death – was bolstered by Nicholas Roerich’s barbaric designs and Vaslav Nijinsky’s aggressively anti-balletic choreography. It certainly stirred the passions of the opening night audience, stoking one of classical music’s most infamous riots.
The ballet was danced only eight times as it was originally conceived. Nijinsky and impresario Serge Diaghilev had a falling out, and when the Ballets Russes revived the work a few years later, it was with new choreography by Léonide Massine. By then, Nijinsky had already been admitted to an asylum, and not for the last time. His increasing instability and death in 1950 led many to believe that his revolutionary conception of the original “Rite” had been lost forever.
Joffrey’s was the first attempt at a reconstruction. It took 16 years and a lot of detective work to bring it to fruition.
How was it accomplished? You can read more about it here.
Enjoy these last few hours of winter. Spring arrives in the Northern Hemisphere at 11:06 PM EDT. With any luck, I’ll be asleep by then, or reading the last 30 pages of “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
March 19 seem a little early for spring? It’s not just because the Groundhog proclaims it so.
Yesterday, though I labored heroically against the effects of Guinness and corned beef and cabbage, before I knew it, it was time to watch “The Quiet Man.” And as a result, I’m now the last person on the internet to report on the death of Byron Janis.
Janis, one-time Horowitz pupil, dynamo of the keyboard, who played through excruciating pain due to arthritis, forced to retire because of the effects of surgery, only to rise again, died on Thursday at the age of 95.
Van Cliburn received all the glory – and a ticker tape parade on Broadway – for his surprise victory at the first Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition in Moscow in 1958, but Janis was just as important, as a cultural ambassador to the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. His first recital there took place just after the Soviets had shot down the U-2 spy plane and Gary Powers was imprisoned. According to Janis, the hostility in the hall was palpable with no applause and the audience chanting, “U-2! U-2! U-2!” But by intermission, they were on their feet applauding and afterwards, people approached the stage with tears in their eyes. “… What I did was important because it showed how music could change people’s feelings,” Janis observed in a 2017 interview with Vantage Music.
Cliburn’s shadow extended to the recording studio, in terms of which concertos his rivals were permitted to record and when. Of course, this was still in the early days of stereo, with every pianist eager to test their mettle against the standard repertoire, and the major labels all vying for a place of honor on America’s hi-fi systems.
What’s astonishing is how many truly spectacular American pianists emerged at the time: off the top of my head, in addition to Cliburn and Janis, there were Leon Fleisher, Gary Graffman, John Browning, Eugene Istomin, Julius Katchen, Abbey Simon, Leonard Pennario. And that’s to say nothing of the international competition. A veritable embarrassment of virtuoso riches!
In his prime, Janis possessed the jaw-dropping technique of an idiosyncratic fire-eater. But this was harnessed to an unerring sense of lyricism and line. His recordings from the 1950s and ‘60s, especially, are thrilling in their spontaneity.
“A lot of young pianists work about eight hours a day on their technique, but they lose their sense of music – their musicality disappears because they are so focused on playing the right notes,” Janis observed, in that same interview with Vantage Music. “Musically, if it’s always the same, it’s not ‘perfect.’ If it isn’t different every time, you aren’t human, and these composers were very human. Chopin changed things all the time. The danger is, with too much freedom, people begin to do anything with it, good or bad. But ‘perfection’ is a dead state.”
His struggles with arthritis and its treatment sent him into retirement and depression for a few years, but he clawed his way back to the concert stage to mark the 50th anniversary of his debut at Carnegie Hall in 1998.
In 1967, Janis identified some lost Chopin manuscripts. And he did so again, in 1973 – the same pieces, in different versions, on two separate continents!
Interestingly, he was also a songwriter who wooed Gary Cooper’s daughter.
At whatever stage of his career, Janis demonstrated, time and again, a remarkable intuition when it came to teasing notes on a page into sustained passages of brilliance and even grandeur. His performances, as his life, defied many obstacles to reveal unanticipated vistas.
Last year on St. Patrick’s Day, I posted some thoughts on John Ford’s perennial classic, “The Quiet Man” (1952), and Maurice Walsh’s book, “Green Rushes” (1935), the collection of stories – really a novel, as all the stories are interconnected – that inspired it. I finally got around to reading it in a reissue, as “The Quiet Man and Other Stories,” after having had it in my library for 30 years.
Toward the end of the post, I mentioned a forthcoming musical, based on another Walsh novel, “Castle Gillian” (1948). (An earlier musical based on “The Quiet Man,” “Donnybrook,” tanked in 1960.) Well, it appears “Castle Gillian” is upon us, and it looks like one freaky, virtual reality uncanny valley. To borrow from the title of yet another one of Walsh’s books, trouble in the glen, indeed!
This morning on “Sweetness and Light,” I’ll be hoisting an Irish coffee on the eve of St. Patrick’s Day.
Join me for a stirabout of Celtic-inflected works by Henry Cowell, John Foulds, Ludwig van Beethoven, Peter Hope, Ignaz Moscheles, and A.J. Potter. I know, not all of these composers are Irish, but isn’t everyone Irish on St. Patrick’s Day?
Your pot of gold is but a click away, this Saturday morning at 11:00 EDT/8:00 PDT on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!
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