The Rite of Spring

Sir Mark conducts three highly contrasting masterpieces, all composed within just eighteen years of each other and each in its own way hugely influential. Satie’s surreal ballet score Parade is bizarre in the best possible way: its instrumentation includes gun shots, sirens and a typewriter! Verklärte Nacht is a wholly different matter and one of the blazing masterpieces of the Romantic era. For string orchestra this work is a highly melodious affair that expresses Schoenberg’s love for his future wife. Pierre Boulez described Stravinsky’s unleashing of his The Rite of Spring upon a scandalised Parisian public in 1913 as ‘an exemplary moment of modernity’. Over one hundred years later, the composer’s extraordinary evocation of pagan fertility rites fully retains its ability to rouse, to excite and to shock.

(Image credit: Benjamin Ealovega)