I've been listening to a fair bit of Stravinsky recently, ever since my post on Monday regarding the Bad Plus and their Rite of Spring project, and in particular the three great early ballets (The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring - which were all, amazingly, composed between 1910 and 1913). The theory has been put forward several times that often a composer's most compelling music is written for the ballet. Obviously, dance itself (and the rhythms it requires) become the inspirational agent, and that certainly seems the case with this music, which is, to some listeners (including this one), the high point of Stravinsky's career. These scores, beautiful, strange and powerful throughout, are as important culturally as they are musically. They are among the defining accomplishments of modernism, as important as Picasso, and, inspired and inspiring, they retain all of their expressive power to this day. Here's a clip of the opening of Petrushka: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbWDG3LU4bc.

Found a most interesting piece of news yesterday on the NPR music site which informs us that the Bad Plus, the American jazz trio with the repertoire of astonishing variety, has taken on a commission to rework Stravinsky's watershed, modernist masterpiece, The Rite of Spring, for their instrumentation and style. You can read more about the project and hear both a sample and an interview here: http://www.npr.org/2011/03/20/134666157/the-bad-plus-tackle-stravinskys-spring. Judging from the clip, it's going to be a tremendous recording when it's completed, and I hope they tour it, too - that would be amazing. During the interview, they call the Rite "the Monster", which is a fair description, both in terms of its technical content and cultural importance. The 2009 film, Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky, got mixed reviews, and I would concur, but the opening scenes which portray the events surrounding the ballet's Paris premiere are terrific. Imagine a time when an orchestral work (along with Nijinsky's choreography) could bring in the riot police; those were the days. The music, though, still sounds both challenging and awesomely beautiful. Here's a link to the Joffrey Ballet's recreation of the original: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjX3oAwv_Fs.