Music Review : Breaking With Tradition: ‘Les Noces’ as Folk Ceremony

In a stunning rebuke to the Western art tradition, the Dmitri Pokrovsky Ensemble performs Stravinsky’s “Les Noces” as an authentic Russian folk ceremony. The controversial results, seen Thursday at the Veterans Wadsworth Theater courtesy of the UCLA Center for the Arts, were exhilarating.

This version, which Pokrovsky argues is the correct way to sing the work, deepened comprehension of the composer’s goals and achievements, affirmed the enduring allure and power of the source material and, coincidentally, cast some doubt about the authenticity of familiar folkloric troupes such as the Moiseyev.

Pokrovsky uses voices untrained--he said from the stage--in the “Italian opera tradition,” but clearly skilled in open-throated vocalism that emphasizes plangent overtones. Think Bulgarian Women’s Chorus. Think real people.

He incorporates choreography observed in village dances and reportedly derived from several major modern dance figures. It is all on a human scale and profoundly moving and involving. New light dawns about Balanchine’s famed interlaced enchainments.

In a sense, Pokrovsky loads the dice by prefacing “Les Noces” with excerpts from traditional--though differing--wedding ceremonies of Southern and Northern Russia. If you accept his premises of their authenticity, his conclusion that Stravinsky not only utilized their texts (as he acknowledged) but found almost half his music there follows in a tight syllogism.

In this way, the cantata emerges as a vivid social event, with side dramas, ceremonial rituals and a multiplicity of recognizable character types, abstracted but not abstract. There were moments of faltering, too, as in real life.

Even the director’s hotly contested use of Yamaha Disklaviers for the four player pianos Stravinsky originally wanted but couldn’t synchronize properly contributed to a sense of triumphant human achievement and order within a frighteningly impersonal natural and cosmic frame.

All in all, a major contribution. Now, on to “Le Sacre du Printemps.”