The facts about the revolutionary character of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring are well known. Capitalizing upon the triumphs of The Firebird (1910) and Petrushka (1911), Sergei Diaghilev commissioned The Rite for The Ballets Russes. A dream team had been assembled for its premiere and rehearsals had proceeded without incident: Vaslav Nijinsky developed the choreography, Nicolas Roerich was responsible for the theatrical design and Pierre Monteux was conductor for the premiere. Later in his life, Stravinsky said he had been caught off-guard by the infamous riot in Paris that occurred on the night of its premiere on May 29, 1913.
Putting it into context, Pieter C. van den Toorn, in his outstanding 1987 book Stravinsky and The Rite of Spring: The Beginnings of a Musical Language, summarized it well: “But the scenario itself, the choreography, and, above all, the close ‘interdisciplinary’ conditions of coordination under which the music is now known to have been composed—these are matters which, after the 1913 premiere, quickly passed from consciousness.” He added, ”Like pieces of a scaffolding, they were abandoned in favor of the edifice itself and relegated to the ‘extra-musical’. They became history, as opposed to living art. Even the title, with its clear suggestion of pagan rites or ‘primitivism,’ lost its specific ties to the subject matter and became almost exclusively a musically descriptive label…”
Photo Credit: Beau Pearson.
In his 1960 book Memories and Commentaries, which was written with his biographer Robert Craft, Stravinsky said that Léonide Massine’s choreography [part of a 1920 revival] was excellent and “incomparably clearer” than Nijinsky’s. The composer explained, ”Choreography, as I conceive it, must realize its own form, one independent of the musical form though measured to the musical unit. Its construction will be based on whatever correspondences the choreographer may invent, but it must not seek merely to duplicate the line and beat of the music. . .”
In what surely will be a blockbuster triple bill production of three great Stravinsky scores, Ballet West’s The Rite of Spring production puts forward the strongest case that, yes, to quote the words of van den Toorn, we can “have it both ways, even if there is little tradition behind the work as dance music, while its hold as a relatively autonomous piece of music has been virtually indestructible.”
This will be the third time that Nicolo Fonte’s choreography for The Rite is produced, which Ballet West premiered in 2014. But, in 2025, as Fonte explained in an interview with The Utah Review, audiences will see a major metamorphosis in this Rite. “The music is so powerful and dynamic in its many different ports of entry that I had to ask what I am really adding so that it does not overpower the music,” Fonte, who was Ballet West resident choreographer from 2012 to 2022, said. To wit: in his program note, he wrote, “ I wanted to strip this version of all literal narrative content and dive into the rhythmical structure of the score. However, there is something inherently ritualistic and primitive at the core of this music that resonates within our collective subconscious, making it difficult to ignore dramatic content altogether.”
Photo Credit: Beau Pearson.
Precisely as he mentioned in the interview about the emancipating experience of hearing the music anew and deciding how its musical DNA inspires the dance moment, his program note concludes, ”Ultimately, this Rite of Spring is inspired by those instinctual emotions felt in the music that triggered many connections for me, between the boundlessness of the human spirit and the need for its renewal.”
Those who attended the 2014 premiere and its 2016 revival at Ballet West and are returning in 2025 will immediately notice that there no longer is a young boy as the “chosen one” in The Rite narrative, even as the visual elements of metal monoliths, leather and rhinestone leotards and water are returned to the stage. This time, in each section, a different dancer emerges as a potential candidate for the eventual sacrifice.
For audiences and reviewers of the two past performances, the boy stood out, in a performance by Henry Winn, who was a Ballet West Academy student at the time. (A 2014 Deseret News review mentioned him extensively in two paragraphs, concluding that he ”performed beyond his years with thoughtful maturity and grace.”) Winn would reprise the role in 2016, although he had grown much taller in the intervening time.
Recalling the 2014 premiere, Fonte said, “I was very lucky because the boy [Winn], who was a teenager but who looked like he could be nine, was smart as a whip and understood the central figure of the music.” He added that when The Rite was performed again two years later, “he had shot up in height and looked like a young grown man, and retrospectively looking at the videos, I realized that the role had now lost its meaning because he was no longer a young boy.”
Photo Credit: Beau Pearson.
It sparked a fresh epiphany for Fonte. “I was very proud of the choreography but I also realized that the narrative had become convoluted because everyone had wondered about what the boy was going to do next,” he added. Fonte removed the role of the boy and reworked the sections accordingly. “It’s the same set and costumes but it is now quite a different ballet. I had realized that with the role of the boy, I was trying too hard and was overreaching. In recent rehearsals, one of the staff members had not recalled seeing a duet with the boy in the earlier version because all they had remembered was the boy, which proved my point.”
Fonte said that he and Jared Oaks, conductor of the Ballet West Orchestra, have aligned and bonded in emphasizing the pure essence of Stravinsky’s music. As musicians and dancers acknowledge mutually, The Rite is a beast of a score, with its bewildering complex of music meter and rhythmic sentences and phrases. In fact, in key moments, Fonte has pared the movement down to a point where the focus is on absorbing the sound of the music coming from the orchestra pit.
“Placed in a post-apocalyptic landscape surrounded by monolithic rusted metal walls, without any true narrative or story per se, Fonte gives us a society that is deeply linked but ultimately doesn’t trust one another,” Adam Sklute, Ballet West artistic director, explained. Sklute’s words could not be more painfully acute for the present sociopolitical moment. The sentiment resonates with the words in van den Toorn’s book (1987): “Leaving aside the pull of sheer nostalgia (and there can surely be very little of this at the present time), an account of the symbolic origins of The Rite, however rigorously determined, can hardly be expected to govern contemporary matters of taste, fashion, or aesthetic appeal.”
Fonte’s choreographic response to Stravinsky’s score reverberates in smart relevance with this perspective. “One hopes that The Rite will continue to survive not as an historical document but as an artistic achievement that must work here and now,” van den Toorn noted. “And surely no one, however much he may have distorted the record from time to time, could have been more acutely sensitive to these issues than Stravinsky himself.”
Immediately preceding The Rite on the program, another ballet, this one created by George Balanchine to a score by Stravinsky, with strong historical ties to Ballet West is Apollo (1928), which premiered at The Ballets Russes. Its American premiere featured Lew Christensen, brother of Ballet West founder Willam Christensen, as Apollo. In 1987, when Mr. C (as the founder was familiarly known) was 85, he recalled when Balanchine was in the Metropolitan, they had dedicated the season to presenting works by Stravinsky: “When the concert was over — Stravinsky was conducting–he got up on stage and thanked Lew for being Apollo,” he said. “Lew was near tears: to go from Brigham City to being thanked by the great Stravinsky for doing Apollo in the Met during the big Stravinsky season.”
Instead of all nine Muses, Apollon musagète (Apollo, Leader of the Muses) relies on three Muses directly important to dance: Calliope for poetry and rhythm, Polyhymnia for mime and Terpsichore for gesture and eloquent movement. In addition to Apollo, there are six other dancers. The prologue opens with the birth of Apollo, and continues with dances by Apollo, along with the three Muses collectively and individually, before concluding with Apollo leading the Muses to Parnassus. Sklute said that Balanchine had changed the choreography towards the end of his life “by doing away with Apollo’s birth and final ascent.” However, Sklute emphasized, “We produce the choreographic version that was done through most of Balanchine’s life, with minimalist sets and costumes, but with the story as originally created with Stravinsky.”
The scoring, which echoes the musical stylings of the French Baroque Era, is exclusively for strings and its writing is uncharacteristically serene, given the context of Stravinsky’s other music composed during that same period. Balanchine, then a young man just in his twenties, thoroughly understood the creative brief presented in Stravinsky’s score. “Apollon I look back on as the turning point of my life. In its discipline and restraint, in its sustained oneness of tone and feeling the score was a revelation. It seemed to tell me that I could dare not to use everything, that I, too, could eliminate,” he wrote in a 1947 article The Dance Element in Stravinsky’s Music for The Opera Quarterly. “It was in studying Apollo that I came first to understand how gestures, like tones in music and shades in painting, have certain family relations. As groups they impose their own laws. The more conscious an artist is, the more he comes to understand these laws, and to respond to them.”
The evening opener will be the Utah premiere of the Symphony of Psalms (1930), featuring the 1978 choreographed version by Czech choreographer Jiří Kylián, who also counts Balanchine as one of his formative influences. Incidentally, Fonte’s mentor was Nacho Duato, who danced under Kylián, which reinforces yet another intergenerational connection. Sklute noted, “As with all of Kylián’s work, it is athletic, fast, acrobatic, and deeply moving. His choreography finds a unique path through Stravinsky’s music, creating a texture, mood, and dynamically its own.” The work is set on 16 dancers.
Serge Koussevitsky commissioned the music to mark the Boston Symphony’s golden anniversary, just about the same time that Stravinsky had rediscovered his Russian Orthodox Church faith. However, while the score takes three Latin texts from the Book of Psalms, the last being notably Aleluia from Psalm 150, it emerges as a work of spiritual theater.
It has an unusual orchestration, omitting the violins and violas while keeping winds, brass, timpani, bass drum, two pianos, harps, cellos and basses, and, of course, there is a SATB choir. The work is immersed in sounds and textures associated with the Orthodox Church: stratification, drones, bells, Byzantine chants, austere icons, etc. The third movement, for instance, was inspired by the Slavonic phrase “gospodi pomiluj” (Lord, have mercy).”
As for the assembled choir, the 32 singers represent the powerhouse of Utah’s historic, rich choral traditions. They were contracted and prepared by Jane Fjeldsted, the highly esteemed director of choirs at Westminster University. Fjeldsted, one of the most active and discerning choral conductors in the region, has worked closely with Ballet West on a number of productions, including Carmina Burana and Les Noces. Brian Pappal, choirmaster for this production, regularly conducts the Wasatch Symphony and the Mapleton Chorale. He made his conducting debut with Ballet West in Balanchine’s Serenade last fall.
With Stravinsky’s music front and center for this production, audiences will take note of the bounty of prominent musical solos that will occur across all three ballets. Among them is Sally Foreman Humphreys, longtime flute and piccolo player, who will retire after this program as a regular core member of the orchestra. ”Behind the scenes, her leadership and wisdom have improved the orchestra’s stability,” Oaks said. “Furthermore, her highly-focused musicianship and pleasant demeanor have brought joy to conductors and audiences. I’m grateful for her friendship and the guidance she has provided me over the years.”
Among other notable musicians who will have showcasing moments is Karen Hastings, whom Oaks said is “a gifted, sensitive, and utterly reliable oboist. With so many successful performances to her name, there is no question that a performance with Hastings will be a good one.” Of course, one must mention the famous opening bassoon solo in The Rite. “Our intoxicating introduction into Stravinsky’s sound world is played by our amazing longtime principal bassoonist Brian Hicks, whose father Roger Hicks was the Ballet West principal bassoonist for 23 seasons,” Oaks said. “Brian approaches his role with a sense of beauty and wonder.”
The five-performance production runs April 4-12 at the Capitol Theatre in downtown Salt Lake City. For tickets and more information, see the Ballet West website.