The Rite of Spring

In the ballet score that made his name, Igor Stravinsky depicted a series of austere and brutal pagan rituals before a pulverizing ‘sacrificial dance’ - a sequence in which a chosen virgin dances herself to death.

The music Stravinsky created to tell the story still mesmerizes audiences today with its strange syncopations, unpredictable rhythms, jarring stresses and unsettling dissonances. A modernist masterpiece it may be, but The Rite of Spring is also a work bursting with life, colour and brilliance, none of which can be ignored.

Before pagan brutalism, Romantic luxuriance. Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider joins the orchestra to play perhaps the best-loved violin concerto of the nineteenth-century - the work Max Bruch wrote for Joseph Joachim, whose seductive richness has never been equaled.

Related concert recordings at Bergenphilive:
Max Bruch: Violin Concerto
Igor Stravinsky: Rite of Spring
Igor Stravinsky: Symphony of Psalms
Igor Stravinsky: Concerto in D
Igor Stravinsky: Feu d'Artifice