Pierre Boulez conducts Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du Printemps)Orchestra Filarmonica della Scala / Milan, 2006
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The Rite of Spring
The Rite of Spring, original French title Le sacre du printemps (Russian: Весна священная, Vesna svyashchennaya), is a ballet with music by Igor Stravinsky; choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky; and concept, set design and costumes by Nicholas Roerich. It was produced by Sergei Diaghilev for his Ballets Russes ballet company and had its première in Paris on 29 May 1913.
The music's innovative complex rhythmic structures, timbres, and use of dissonance have made it a seminal 20th century composition. In 1973, composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein said of one passage, "That page is sixty years old, but it's never been topped for sophisticated handling of primitive rhythms...", and of the work as a whole, "...it's also got the best dissonances anyone ever thought up, and the best asymmetries and polytonalities and polyrhythms and whatever else you care to name."
A performance of the work lasts about 33 minutes.
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