The ‘Rite’ Springs to Life Under Salonen’s Baton

The best and most famous music scandal of the century occurred here at the Champs-Elysees Theater in 1913 when police had to be called in to break up the riot caused by the premiere of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” with the composer fleeing the scene scared for his life but ecstatic nonetheless. Some historians date the beginning of modern music from that merry moment.

Like other radical art that first outraged the Parisians--say, the Eiffel Tower or Manet’s “Dejeuner sur l’Herbe”--the “Rite” soon enough became a beloved monument. It was, in fact, already embraced by the audience at its second performance, and who knows how many thousands of times it has been played and rapturously received in Paris over the last 83 years.

The latest of those occasions occurred Tuesday night a mile or two away from the site of the riot, this time with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, led by its music director Esa-Pekka Salonen. The Cha^telet Theater was sold out and in the crowded entranceway there were ticket-seekers who sounded as desperate as any beggar on the Metro.

And the audience got just the virtuosic, daredevil, goosebump-raising “Rite” it clearly wanted. Salonen was electric, and the orchestral energy level approached circuit overload. Waves of rhythmic clapping and foot stomping followed, swelling every time Salonen asked a player or section of the orchestra to stand. Loud bravos called for the conductor again and again. There, of course, is nothing that the French appreciate more than foreigners treating French art with such life-and-death importance.

Salonen’s “Rite” works so well here because it seems a perfect combination of Paris and Hollywood. He conducts it very differently from the ways we know Stravinsky did, in the recordings he made of it or as remembered from his performances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic late in his life. Stravinsky emphasized the work’s extraordinary clockwork complexity. Salonen, while maintaining rhythmic surety and textural clarity, is more the showman.

The work’s famous difficulties have long ceased to faze him, as he strives for a blazing dramatic thrust. This performance, glamorous and showstopping, contains much the same spirit as the big, gleaming, new architectural monuments that have been going up around Paris lately.

But Salonen also has something else in mind. The Los Angeles Philharmonic opened a large-scale Stravinsky festival at the Cha^telet last weekend with the opera “The Rake’s Progress,” and Tuesday’s program was the first orchestral concert in a series that will include three more programs by the Philharmonic (concentrating mainly on music Stravinsky wrote in Los Angeles) along with contributions from a number of other visiting orchestras.

To demonstrate Stravinsky’s Russian roots, Salonen opened the program with Mussorgsky, the composer’s original version of “A Night on Bald Mountain” and his “Songs and Dances of Death” in Shostakovich’s orchestration. And the Russian-ness of Stravinsky just happens to be hot news.

Richard Taruskin at UC Berkeley has just published a nearly 2,000-page study, “Stravinsky and the Russian Tradition,” that demonstrates that the composer was far more Russian than Parisian in his early ballets. And Mussorgsky, who often accompanied Stravinsky’s father (a great baritone at the Kirov Opera in St. Petersburg) in recital, was a major influence.

But Salonen not only erased the feeling of Russian folk sources from Stravinsky’s great ballet (as Stravinsky later in life wanted people to do) but his Mussorgsky equally was made of clean modern lines. Moreover, Denyce Graves, who sang the “Songs and Dances of Death,” had to learn them quickly when baritone Willard White canceled.

And while she has an impressively luxuriant mezzo-soprano and is rapidly becoming an important singer, she, too, had little of the Russian sardonic quality that needs to color every word in these songs of death personified, walking in and waltzing life away.

Nor did the orchestra quite find its own voice until the second half of the concert. But it is notable that the voice it did finally find was a voice the hometown crowd at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion never hears. In the live, intimate acoustic of the Cha^telet, the Philharmonic sound has an arresting immediacy. One feels a direct contact with each instrument. When the bass drum is hit hard, it vibrates in the listener’s gut.

And the word around Paris, at the moment, is that if more Angelenos could hear sound like this, they would be just as ecstatic as the Parisians were Tuesday, and there would be no stopping the building of the new Disney Concert Hall.