Vertical Stravinsky

In music and dance, Le sacre du printemps has embodied the rupture with prevailing conventions ever since its 1913 premiere. Stravinsky’s own two-piano transcription of this groundbreaking work is heard alongside La Valse—Ravel’s musical revue of the Viennese monarchy collapsing in the First World War, and at the same time a fantastical, deadly apotheosis of the waltz. In contrast stands the Sonata for Two Pianos (1942) by Paul Hindemith, written in the midst of the Second World War, whose recitative section features the lines Of this worldes joie, hou hit goth al to noth from a medieval English ballad.

Two dancers, seemingly weightless, move suspended by ropes, opening the space into the vertical. Image by image, movement and sound unfold the metamorphoses—between death and rebirth, past and future.

CAST
Rebekka Gather & Laetitia Kohler – Vertical Dance
Kirill Zvegintsov & Leonhard Dering – Two Pianos

PROGRAM

Paul Hindemith – Sonata for Two Pianos (1942)

Igor Stravinsky – Le sacre du printemps. Pictures from Pagan Russia (1913)
I. The Adoration of the Earth
II. The Sacrifice

Maurice Ravel – La Valse – Choreographic Poem (1906–20)

Nikolai Korndorf – Lullaby (1984)