THE RITE OF SPRING

Tim Horton & Ivana Gavrić

Crucible Playhouse, Sheffield
Friday 10 January 2025, 7.00pm

Tickets:
£22
£14 UC, PIP & DLA
£5 Students & Under 35s

Past Event
Pianists Tim Horton and Ivana Gavric

SHOSTAKOVICH Concertino in A minor for two pianos (10’) 
RACHMANINOV Suite No.1 for two pianos (24’) 
STRAVINSKY (arr. Stravinsky) The Rite of Spring (34’)  

The Romantic lyricism of Rachmaninov’s Suite No.1 for two pianos and Shostakovich’s Concertino featuring rousing Soviet-era dance tunes open this all-Russian evening of music for two pianos. These sit alongside Stravinsky’s riotous masterpiece The Rite of Spring, all performed by two of the UK’s leading concert pianists, Tim Horton and Ivana Gavrić.

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SHOSTAKOVICH Dmitri, Concertino in A minor for two pianos, Op. 94

Shostakovich composed this miniature single-movement work for two pianos in 1954, just after completing his Tenth Symphony. It was written for his son Maxim, then a teenager studying the piano at the Moscow Conservatory. He gave the first performance with another student, Alla Maloletkova, on 8 November 1954; soon afterwards Shostakovich father-and-son made the first recording. It opens with a slow introduction in which stern, austere octaves contrast with a chorale-like idea, before launching into a sardonic Allegretto. Slow and fast sections alternate until a final dash to the close. Though some of the material is of a serious nature, much of the Concertino is quite playful, as befits a work originally conceived for young players. For Shostakovich, it must have come as a welcome relief after the Tenth Symphony, one of his most concentrated and fiercely argued masterpieces.

 

Nigel Simeone

RACHMANINOV Sergei, Suite No.1 in G minor, Op. 5

Barcarolle: Allegretto 
La nuit…l’amour [The night, the love]: Adagio sostenuto 
Les larmes [Tears] Largo di molto 
Pâques [Easter]: Allegro maestoso 
Subtitled ‘Fantaisie-Tableaux’, Rachmaninov composed his Suite No. 1 for two pianos in 1893. He gave the first performance with Pavel Pabst in Moscow on 30 November 1893. This was an occasion tinged with sadness: Rachmaninov dedicated the Suite to Tchaikovsky, who was planning to attend, but he died a few weeks earlier (and even before the premiere of the Suite, Rachmaninov started work on his tragic Trio élégiaque Op. 9 written in memory of Tchaikovsky). The Suite consists of four movements each of which was inspired by poetry. The ‘Barcarolle’ evokes a melancholy gondolier’s song, based on a poem by Lermontov in which ‘the gondola glides through the water, and time glides over surges of love.’ The second movement, ‘The Night…the love’ was inspired by Byron and depicts a passionate night-time tryst (‘It is the hour when lovers’ vows seem sweet in every whisper’d word’), accompanied by the song of a nightingale. In ‘Tears’, Rachmaninov took a poem by Fyodor Tyutchev about an endless cascade of weeping, evoked in the music by a series of falling phrases. The last movement, ‘Easter’, takes lines by Alexei Khomyakov as its starting point: ‘Across the earth a might bell is ringing … exulting in that holy victory.’ For this, Rachmaninov produced a magnificent evocation of Orthodox church bells – large and small – chiming at different speeds, and he also incorporated the chant ‘Christ is risen’.
Nigel Simeone

STRAVINSKY Igor, The Rite of Spring (arr. Stravinsky for piano four hands)

Stravinsky composed part of his elemental masterpiece, The Rite of Spring, on his family estate in the Ukraine, but the work was completed in the Swiss village of Clarens, overlooking Lake Geneva, with spectacular views of Mont Blanc and of the Swiss Alps down the Rhone Valley. Coincidentally, Clarens was also where Tchaikovsky had composed his Violin Concerto forty years earlier. The famous premiere, on 29 May 1913, took place at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. The riot that ensued was largely the result of engineering by Serge Diaghilev, an impresario who learned early on that all publicity was good publicity for his Ballets Russes. By inviting a large group of students to sit alongside the regular subscribers, and by putting The Rite of Spring at the end of the first half of the programme – straight after the Chopin ballet Les Sylphides – the work had maximum shock value. Stravinsky was furious that his score couldn’t be heard, but delighted when its first concert performance in Paris a year later was greeted with such enthusiasm that he was carried through the streets afterwards. A few weeks before the first night, Stravinsky had played through the work in his piano four-hands arrangement with Debussy, and it was in this form that the work first appeared in print. It is a work that has never lost its power to astonish – and in this four-hand arrangement it loses nothing of its rhythmic daring and what Messiaen called its “magic power”.

 

Nigel Simeone © 2012

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