The Hallé: The Rite of Spring

Schoenberg Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night)  (30′)
Satie Parade  (14′)
Stravinsky The Rite of Spring  (35′ )

Sir Mark conducts three highly contrasting masterpieces, all composed within just eighteen years of each other and each in its own way hugely influential. Verklärte Nacht is one of the blazing masterpieces of the Romantic era, a highly melodious affair for string orchestra that expresses Schoenberg’s love for his future wife. Satie’s surreal ballet score Parade is bizarre in the best possible way: its instrumentation includes gun shots, sirens and a typewriter! Pierre Boulez described Stravinsky’s unleashing of his The Rite of Spring upon a scandalised Parisian public in 1913 as ‘an exemplary moment of modernity’. Over one hundred years later, the composer’s extraordinary evocation of pagan fertility rites fully retains its ability to rouse, to excite and to shock.