Le Sacre du printemps

What are you going to listen to?

Music is emotion, whether it’s the adrenaline rush of Adams, the beautiful and dark sides of love as portrayed by Jeths, or the primal instincts that Stravinsky awakens in us. So this isn’t a concert for the phlegmatic among us.

Racing

“Have you ever been invited by someone to drive a flashy sports car and then wished you’d never done it?” asks John Adams in the preface to his *Short Ride in a Fast Machine*. He spoke from experience, for it had indeed happened to him. “Never again,” he thought, but it was also an unforgettable experience. Perfect for a short but powerful orchestral piece: “Short Ride” lasts only four minutes. A hard-pounding woodblock sets a pulsating meter over which the orchestra races away in swelling crescendos. The music depicts not so much the roaring engine of the race car as the relentless adrenaline rushing through your body. After this short piece, you’ll find yourself wondering for a moment whether you’d like to take a lap around the track with Max Verstappen….

A new piano concerto

“It actually started with a chance encounter,” says Willem Jeths. It is mid-March. Over the phone, the composer explains how, nearly thirty years after his Second Piano Concerto “Fas/Nefas” (1997), he finally came to compose a third. “I ran into Ellen two years ago in Italy, where we both spend a lot of time. When she asked me if I would write a piano concerto for her, I didn’t have to think twice.”

The fact that he agreed immediately has everything to do with a shared musical history spanning some forty years. When Jeths made a name for himself internationally in the late 1980s with *Novelette* for violin and piano (selected, among other places, for the ISCM World Music Days in Oslo), Corver frequently included the piece in his program with violinist Peter Brunt. Jeths later wrote his piano trio Chiasmos (2000) especially for their Osiris Trio. “I’ve always thought Ellen was a fantastic pianist,” says Jeths. “She can really do anything. She’s very precise rhythmically, but she can also color beautifully, phrase, and create long melodic lines. She’s actually the ideal pianist to write a concerto for.”

Despite his undisputed skills as a soloist, composing his new concerto proved to be quite a challenge. Jeths worked on the piece for a little over a year and a half, a period during which he often wondered what he actually wanted to add to the two piano concertos he had already written.

Ultimately, his Third Piano Concerto became a response to his Second, says Jeths. Whereas *Fas/Nefas* was rife with modernist sound experiments and timbre exercises (the soloist plays with his hands inside the instrument and with sticks on the strings), in *Scorching Passions* Jeths employs a more traditional style of pianism. Jeths: “Just for the black-and-white of the keys. There’s quite a bit of tradition shining through in the solo part. Long lines in the voice leading, a surprising amount of counterpoint. ‘Gosh, this sounds just like Bach,’ Ellen said when we went through the score together recently.”

Thematically, Jeths’ *Derde* is also loosely related to his operas. Just as in *Hôtel de Pekin* (2008), about the Last of China, and *Ritratto* (2020), about the eccentric Italian marquise Luisa Casati, *Scorching Passions* centers on a female figure. Or more precisely: a number of overlapping female archetypes, around which Jeths constructed a richly contrasting triptych on the theme of love (hence the “scorching passions” of the title).

From an early stage, Jeths knew he wanted to do something with Alecto, one of the three Furies from Greek mythology: “That image of an unapproachable, ruthless woman stayed with me. It also resonated strongly with Turandot, another ice queen bent on revenge who initially rejects love.” Jeths was greatly surprised when he discovered that the main motif of Puccini’s Turandot is, in terms of sound, virtually identical to the diminished seventh chord he had already used as the foundation for his concerto in the initial sketching phase. The first movement thus features fragments of the Turandot motif. Meanwhile, the soloist slowly breaks free from the orchestra’s grip: first coaxing, then increasingly assertively resisting, to finally liberate herself with percussive cluster chords. Gradually, Jeths’s female figure transforms. In the second movement, she appears as a dazzling femme fatale who craves adoration. In the final movement, she becomes the embodiment of true love, culminating in an ecstatic union akin to that in Wagner’s *Tristan und Isolde*, in which love and death are inextricably linked. Those who listen closely will hear echoes of the famous Tristan chord.

Primitive fear

Following the success of *The Firebird* and *Petrushka*, composer Igor Stravinsky, dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, and impresario Sergei Diaghilev conceived a ballet that was to be even more spectacular. “Scenes from Pagan Russia” was the working title. A scenario was developed in which a prehistoric tribe selects a young virgin from among them who, through dance, sacrifices herself to Spring until death as a prayer for a fruitful year. “I would like my work to express the feeling of a close connection between humanity and the earth, between human life and the soil, and I have tried to achieve this through a lapidary rhythm,” in Stravinsky’s own words.

The music, but especially the choreography, led to one of the most notorious scandals in music history. But it also led to one of the greatest successes. For after the turbulent premiere, the ballet began to receive greater appreciation in subsequent performances. Less than a year later, during a concert performance, the success was so overwhelming that the composer was carried through the streets of Paris on the shoulders of the enthusiastic crowd.

All things considered, even at its 1913 premiere, Stravinsky’s music—viewed in the context of the musical climate of the time—was not nearly as radically innovative as one might think. And while the ballet was indeed completely different from anything people had ever seen, it was certainly not as scandalous as it later became in the popular imagination. Rather, it is the incredible directness of primitive human emotion that makes the listener and viewer feel uneasy. In The Rite, this is the prehistoric fear of nature’s life-giving yet life-taking power. Despite all our civilization, that instinctive primal fear of life’s fragility still resides within us, something that Stravinsky’s music brings into sharp relief. This makes Le Sacre du Printemps a fascinating but sometimes also a frightening ballet.

I wonder if Bram Kortekaas felt that too? It is precisely that primal fear that plays the leading role in his composition *L’élue*, which serves as a prelude to Stravinsky’s *Le sacre*. At sunrise on the first day of spring, one of the tribe’s girls has a terrifying vision in which she is chosen to give her life for the good of the community. The vision fades away as the first notes of Stravinsky’s music sound.

Kees Wisse and Joep Christenhusz