Proms on Four: 20th Century Classics - Les Siecles BBC Proms

Welcome to a century - and more - of musical shocks of the new.

Over the next few Sundays at the Proms,

we journey into the sounds and furies of the modern era,

experiencing how music shouts down tyranny in Shostakovich's 11th Symphony

and expresses the beginning of a new world order

in Elgar, Britten and Tippett.

We'll hear how it transcends conflict

in Polish composer Lutoslawski's Cello Concerto

and dances with the Grim Reaper

in a world premiere from British composer Thomas Ades.

And throughout all of the concerts each Sunday, I'll give you

my take on how music has responded to, reflected

and shaped the tragedies and triumphs

of the most turbulent 100 years in human history -

from 1913 - until right now.

We start with the single piece of music

that changed everything in the 20th century,

Igor Stravinsky's ballet, The Rite of Spring.

Francois Xavier-Roth and his orchestra Les Siecles

are doing something that's never been done before at the Proms.

They're going to play Stravinsky's original score

on instruments they were written for when the curtain went up that night

at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees, in Paris at the end of May 1913.

It was a night at the ballet that turned into a near riot.

MUSIC: "The Rite of Spring" by Igor Stravinsky

It means that we'll hear the Rite's rawness,

its earthiness and its violence as we hardly ever do today,

because the Rite just has to be shocking.

If it doesn't shake you to the core, if it doesn't make you feel

that the guts of the Earth are opening up,

or at least that the Royal Albert Hall is being immolated in orchestral violence

then the performers just ain't doing it right.

"RITE OF SPRING" CONTINUES OVER VOLCANIC RUMBLING

The Rite makes noises that music had never dared to before,

like the extreme and high bassoon song that the whole work opens with

or the voluptuous overload of the music

at the start of the second part, The Sacrifice,

and there's the sheer, rhythmic power that pulverises you

at the end of both halves of the piece.

It pulverises the performers, too.

In 35 minutes, the Rite tells a story in which

a girl is chosen to dance herself to death

to appease the Russian gods of the seasons, the pagan gods.

That story was originally and shockingly choreographed

by Vaslav Nijinsky.

The mayhem the 1913 wasn't just in the stalls, it was on stage too.

Nijinsky had come up with a new kind of choreographic language.

Instead of graceful prima ballerinas,

he came up instead with earthy, clod-hopping primitives.

And dancing the lead role of The Chosen One at the first performance

was an English teenager called Lydia Sokolova.

She'd only joined Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes the month before

and she was thrown in when another dancer had fallen ill.

Also dancing that opening night was the great Marie Rambert.

They both spoke to the BBC half a century later.

Now it was a very, very difficult thing for people of those days,

dancers of those days, who had been used to dancing

to Chopin or Ravel, easy things, melodious music,

to suddenly have thrust upon them

this gigantic work, a modern thing that was 25 years in advance

of what they had been used to.

Nijinsky insisted absolutely that every note of the music

should be done by a step or a movement of the arms and so on.

In the end I think he was right, because the music was so powerful,

and its rhythmic impact so tremendous

that when it was all done by a company of magnificent dancers - as they were -

that practically doubled the impact of what Stravinsky had written.

But it was received with absolute uproar, wasn't it?

They had prepared in Paris for a riot, you know,

like they do today, but in a different sphere.

They had got themselves all ready.

They didn't even let the music be played for the overture.

As soon as it was known that the conductor was there, the uproar began.

Diaghilev in advance said, "Whatever happens,

"the conductor must go on playing and we go on dancing."

It was terribly difficult to hear the orchestra

because of all that noise in the audience,

until Nijinsky stood in the wings, counting out 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2,

1, 2, 3.

ORCHESTRAL MUSIC TAKES UP JAGGED "1, 2, 3, 1, 2" RHYTHM

It was so exhausting,

so utterly and completely exhausting.

And when I collapsed at the end I collapsed really and truly.

The dancers pushed themselves to almost inhuman lengths

to enact the gripping paradox at the heart of The Rite's drama

which is at once bodily and mechanical.

The music becomes an automaton in its final thrilling few minutes

as The Chosen One dances to her annihilation.

Stravinsky makes a sequence of dozens of small musical cogs mesh together,

that create a gigantic orchestral sacrifice machine that,

even as a concert piece, consumes everything in its path -

the girl, the orchestra, us listeners.

"RITE OF SPRING" CONTINUES OVER BOOMING OF HEAVY ARTILLERY

So it's a prophetic, ultra-modern vision of mechanisation,

on the eve of the First World War.

But it's also an evocation of a primordial primitivism

- like the painterly return-to-roots that Picasso

and Cezanne were up to at a similar time in Paris.

I think Stravinsky's music is more powerful than the pictures,

because it turns that aesthetic knife-edge of primitivist modernism

into a real-life sonic, musical, and above all bodily experience

that lacerates and pummels us,

and ultimately extinguishes that sacrificial victim, The Chosen One.

So here it is - Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring,

performed by Les Siecles, conducted by Francois-Xavier Roth.

You can follow my guide to The Rite of Spring live on Twitter, live at -

See you on the other side of The Sacrifice.

APPLAUSE

Stravinsky's Rite Of Spring at the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall.

Francois-Xavier Roth conducted his orchestra, Les Siecles,

on instruments from the time of The Rite's seismic premiere,

100 ago.

We survived - just! - even as the sacrificial victim is murdered

by the inescapable power

of Stravinsky's mechanistic yet earthy music.

Not quite the doodlings of a madman, I promise -

this is my version of a drawing

that Igor Stravinsky himself made in the late 1950s

when his friend and amanuensis, Robert Craft, asked him

what his music might look like.

So you see...points, lines, intersections, blocks, repetitions.

All right, it's only wee,

but it's like a micro-realisation

of the savage geometries of The Rite.

Look, see how the line wraps around itself and crosses itself out?

It's almost as if it's dancing its way to oblivion.

Stravinsky's Rite sounds unprecedented.

But that's not really true.

It's rooted most obviously in its immediate predecessors -

Stravinsky's two previous ballets, The Firebird and Petrushka,

written, like The Rite Of Spring,

for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.

But it's also part of a much longer story

of exotic music for extraordinary bodies

that premiered on Parisian stages.

The other half of Francois-Xavier Roth's Prom

with his orchestra, Les Siecles,

is a scintillating survey of French ballet music

from the 17th century to the 19th,

music by Lully, Rameau, Delibes and Massenet.

It's all connected, as Francois-Xavier Roth told me.

This programme is really interesting, because the main theme -

we just heard Le Sacre Du Printemps -

the main them is the dance.

And we, Les Siecles, as a French orchestra,

for sure, the dance, since Louis XIV,

is something extremely important,

extremely noble in the music.

And one other possible connection across the whole

of tonight's programme is a sense of exoticism,

whether it's the dandified gentleman of Lully's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme,

the savages, the wild men, of Les Indes Galantes by Rameau,

the dancing dolls who come to life in Coppelia, or the Moors of Le Cid,

does exoticism sort of arc across the whole programme tonight?

Certainly.

Certainly there is, and also, I would say,

this...this passion of the rhythm and this aspect of, I would say,

super-sophistication of the rhythm.

You find it so radically in Le Sacre Du Printemps.

It's also something that...it's like a tsunami with Stravinsky.

It's more subtle or more...yes, subtle with Lully,

but it's the same goal - that the rhythm takes you from your seats.

So with Les Siecles, you're playing instruments of the period.

Then we've heard more than 100 instruments

from around about 1913,

the premiere of The Rite Of Spring,

music from the 19th century and the Baroque period,

the Baroque and Classical period too.

Does that then mean, Francois-Xavier, we've got three...

really three sets of instruments for this concert?

Yes. It's a specification of this orchestra

that we use every right period instruments for every repertoire.

I love this idea.

You find the music, the interactions,

the articulation,

the general sound envelope completely different

with the period instruments.

And that also it is so easy, so...

obvious to play the music.

The Les Siecles project isn't just about instruments of the period -

it's also about conducting of the period.

When Jean-Baptiste Lully was conducting

at the Court of the Sun King in the 17th century,

he used a staff to beat on the ground,

beat the rhythm on the ground.

In fact, he did that so vociferously one night, he injured his big toe

and in fact died from the injury, from the gangrene that resulted.

So, how far are you taking the period conducting

with Les Siecles?

You know, the conductor's job is very new in music history.

And at the time of Lully and Rameau, the conductor didn't exist.

It was somebody who did beat,

to give the rhythm, to give the speed.

So it's why I have a baton and I beat.

It gives the right impact, the right energy for the players.

And when I start to beat, they get ready and then they play.

GENTLE BEATS

APPLAUSE

Music from Lully's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, played by Les Siecles.

And hopefully you noticed that amazing instrument

that looks like a hat stand with bells on.

In French, it's known as the Chapeau Chinois - or Chinese hat -

and in English, the Jingling Johnny.

Next up, music from Jean-Phillippe Rameau - Les Indes Galantes.

APPLAUSE

The dances of Les Sauvages.

Rather gallant, chivalrous savages, but exotic wild men

from the furthest reaches of the Americas nonetheless,

as imagined by Jean-Phillippe Rameau

in his 1735 opera-ballet Les Indes Galantes.

Taking my cue from Robert Craft and Igor Stravinsky,

I've come up with a couple of visual representations

of the music we've just been hearing.

For Lully, a 17th-century stick man,

appropriately perriwigged and in rhetorical pose,

framed by a knot garden of squares.

And for the Rameau...

a savage exotic encased by a French Enlightenment sun.

Er, maybe I need to go back to drawing school.

Now, Les Siecles have moved on from the Baroque

to authentic instruments of a more recent vintage

for the two suites of 19th-century French ballet music

that we're going to hear next,

starting with Coppelia by Leo Delibes.

Stravinsky wasn't the first

to come up with a mechanical kind of ballet.

Coppelia is the story of a workshop of dolls that come to life.

A young man is so entranced with one of these dancing dolls

that his real-life lover pretends to be a manikin

in order to show him the error of his ways.

Long live the real flesh!

MUSIC PLAYS

It's actually pretty creepy when you think about it.

A kind of 19th-century dream of what happens

when sex is instrumentalised and when female bodies are reduced

to inanimate objects seen through the fantasies

of a weirdo toy-maker turned fetishist.

But maybe I'm reading too much into it.

The music, after all is really rather gorgeous,

even if the tunes themselves are like little repetitive devices

rather than flesh-and-blood creations.

APPLAUSE

Music from Coppelia by Leo Delibes.

Francois-Xavier Roth conducted his orchestra Les Siecles,

playing 19th-century instruments, at the Proms.

The last suite of ballet music we're going to hear

is from Jules Massenet's 1885 opera Le Cid.

This is a story of passion, love and war on the Iberian peninsula,

taking us on a journey into lusty, Latin climes,

with dances evoking Catalonia, Andalucia and Madrid.

You'll hear authentically inauthentic castanets,

drums and dance rhythms.

That's because Massenet's music is an ersatz vision of Spain

seen through the eyes of a late 19th-century French composer.

Spain was the best of all possible places to set your story

of unbounded passion if you were a French composer like Massenet,

especially in the wake of Bizet's Carmen,

which had premiered ten years before in Paris.

In fact, it was only once the Parisians had had their fill

of passionate Latins dancing across their stages

that they were ready for something even more out there,

even more fantastical, even more exotic -

the Russians, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes.

But that, as we know, is another story.

APPLAUSE

Latin-loving ballet music

from French composer Jules Massenet's opera Le Cid.

Francois-Xavier Roth conducted his Les Siecles musicians

at the Proms.

Take those rhythms and warp them just a wee bit,

put those tunes on top of one another

and mash up the harmonies, and you might just end up

with something like the music we started with tonight,

Stravinsky's The Rite Of Spring.

That's just about all for this Sunday.

The next Prom you can catch on TV is on Thursday on BBC Four.

As part of the Orchestras of the World series,

Antonio Pappano conducts the Santa Cecilia Orchestra

in a programme of Mozart, Schumann and Rachmaninov.

And every Prom is live on Radio 3.

Next Sunday, one of the highlights of the whole Proms season for me -

the world premiere of Thomas Ades's Totentanz,

his Dance Of Death,

which the brilliant composer himself will conduct.

I'll be talking to Ades throughout the programme,

in which he'll also conduct the dark, dazzling drama of music

by two composers whose centenaries we're celebrating this year -

Witold Lutoslawski and Benjamin Britten.

Join me next Sunday

for more of the sounds and furies of Modern Times.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd