The Rite of Spring

Grieghallen

Fabien Gabel leads the Bergen Philharmonic Youth Orchestra in the work that changed musical history.

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.