Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring)

The Staatsorchester Darmstadt under Will Humburg performed three mightly works for large orchestra to bring its season to a close: Kurtág's Stele, Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.

This was a most impressive showing from the orchestra and conductor in which the works of three influential composers given emotionally engrossing treatment.

A top heavy programme marred Leif Ove Andsnes and Marc-André Hamelin's two piano recital at Wigmore Hall, though it had its moments of high inspiration. 

English National Ballet's ambitious triple bill does not disappoint; it shows a company on the rise. 

Paul Taylor American Modern Dance is getting ready for the transition to the time when it will have to go on without its founder and creative spirit.

Esa-Pekka Salonen’s colorful program included the first Chicago performance of John Adams’ Scheherazade.2 with dedicatee Leila Josefowicz, along with works of Debussy and Stravinsky.

A truly remarkable performance of Stravinky's Sacre by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and Daniele Gatti.

Choreographers Marco Goerke and Edward Clug take Stravinsky’s two most familiar ballet works to a whole new level.

Charles Dutoit, still sporting his trademark slick of black hair and a 79-year-old whirlwind of francophone charisma, clearly brings this band's playing to a new level, especially when the repertoire happens to be French and Russian music of the 20th century.

The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra's prom brought to a fitting close a magical weekend of music from musicians north of the border.

Simone Young conducts the West Australian Symphony Orchestra in a high octane performance of Holst The Planets and Stravinsky The Rite of Spring

Vasily Petrenko and the RLPO perform an all-Russian programme, with an exceptional Rite of Spring and charismatic playing from solo harpist Catrin Finch. 

In the first concert of their exciting series Stravinsky: Myth and Ritual celebrating the varied musical inspirations of this most iconic figure of 20th-century composers, the focus was on Rituals. 

The Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal and Kent Nagano give terrific performances of Debussy, Prokofiev and Stravinsky as they embark on their American tour. 

Rising superstar Gustavo Dudamel led mixed interpretations of two of Stravinky's best-loved scores; consistently good orchestral playing was augmented by occasional glimpses of brilliance. 

The latest concert by the Spanish National Orchestra was a fascinating opportunity to explore the contrast between Wagner and Stravinsky.

Three substantial works from 1800, 1913 and 2008 in an enterprising and unusual combination, performed by the London Phlharmonic Orchestra conducted by Markus Stenz, and with the Moldovan violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja as soloist.

This superb concert deserved a full house, but there were more bodies on the platform for the Rite of Spring than listeners in the front stalls.

Gergiev and the LSO in an explosive, primeval Rite of Spring.

A colourful concert from the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra and Andrew Litton, which included two world premières and the fourth Proms appearance of Russian violinist Alina Ibragimova.

French pianists François-Fréderic Guy and Jean-Efflam Bavouzet returned to London’s Wigmore Hall to present a programme of three 20th century orchestral scores transcribed for two pianos. 

The Rite of Spring provides the centrepiece of Alice Sara Ott and Francesco Tristano's "Scandale" programme, an often fatiguing programme, but thrillingly performed. 

The London Symphony Orchestra celebrates Boulez at 90 with a compelling performance under his protege Péter Eötvös.

Barbara Hannigan joined the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle for performances of Berg’s Three Fragments from Wozzeck and Ligeti’s Mysteries of the Macabre. 

For their final season concert, Morlot leads the Seattle Symphony in an ambitious programme of all three of Stravinsky's pre-WWI scores for the Ballets Russes.

Fabulous Beast Dance Theatres's Michael Keegan-Dolan's renditions of Rite of Spring + Petrushka were eerily magical and playful.

The overriding theme of the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra’s season finale concert appeared to be night, teaming Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht and Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain with the raging force and violence of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.

Conductor and wunderkind Yannick Nézet-Séguin returned home to Montreal to lauch the 33rd season of L’Orchestre Métropolitain with a concert dedicated to compositions written or created a century ago in 1913.

Rarely does one see five grand pianos in one room, let alone on one stage. Enter the 5 Browns, a classical piano quintet. Siblings and Juilliard graduates – they were the first family to be enrolled at the Juilliard School simultaneously – it is clear this family has talent. Performing individually and together, this young ensemble has a vivacious and affable approach to classical music.

With the double bicentenary of Verdi and Wagner this year, other musical landmarks risk being eclipsed. But this October “La Verdi” commemorate the 140th anniversary of Rachmaninov’s birth with a series of concerts and lectures featuring all four of his piano concertos alongside works by other Russian greats.

“Gergiev, your silence is killing Russian gays!” Activists from Queer Nation had disrupted opening night at the Metropolitan Opera three weeks ago, and with demonstrations outside it was almost inevitable that the same protests would accompany the start of the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra’s three-concert stay at Carnegie Hall.

At the end of yesterday’s concert, there was a lot of hugging on stage. This was only to be expected. The high-quality music-making to which the audience had been treated was, for the players, a brief and unrepeatable experience, for some of them a nostalgic pilgrimage back to their homeland.

One hundred years after the première performance of Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring, perhaps one of the most controversial and infamous stage premières of all time, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Barbican Centre’s Total Immersion collaboration provided an all-round look at every aspect of the music, choreography and the première itself through a variety of events on Sunday, culmi

It may have been the autumn equinox, but this evening spring came to a balmy Birmingham, meteorologically and musically. Symphony Hall was abuzz in anticipation of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in the piece’s centenary year, but the concert – and the 2013/14 season – was launched with Wagner’s Tannhäuser overture.

The Berliner Philharmoniker and Sir Simon Rattle came to Paris last weekend for an eclectic program: Mozart’s final three symphonies on Saturday night, and the decadence of Schoenberg, Berg and Stravinsky on Sunday afternoon.

There are new forces at the helm at the Oslo Philharmonic. After last season’s final concert of Mahler’s Second Symphony, the farewell of the orchestra’s longtime chief conductor Jukka-Pekka Saraste, this season’s opener was the inaugural concert of the new chief conductor, Vasily Petrenko. Expectations have been high, especially after some very successful concerts this spring.

Inside the Benedict Music Tent this evening the Aspen Festival Orchestra, all in white to match the walls of the tent, began to warm up for their penultimate concert of the season.

The amount of attention Igor Stravinsky’s iconoclastic ballet score The Rite of Spring has received this year – its 100th – has been enormous, perhaps even excessive. Countless important works, after all, routinely have anniversaries to celebrate, and very few are lucky enough to receive much particular attention. On Bachtrack alone, the year has seen nine concert reviews of the Rite so far.

For the second of his two concerts conducting the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Charles Dutoit presented a program consisting of highly contrasting works by Stravinsky and Mendelssohn, including Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, celebrating the 100th anniversary of work’s first performance in 1913.

The première of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées was a roaring success, literally. There was such commotion among the audience that the dancers could hardly hear the music, despite the determined effort of conductor Pierre Monteaux to keep going.

The centenary of the première of The Rite of Spring – now that is something to celebrate. The Philharmonia, led by chief conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, did it in style, with Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune by Claude Debussy (who of course famously performed the Rite with Stravinsky on the piano), Amériques by Edgard Varèse (who was present at the première, and very much influenced by

The white walls of the hallway leading to the auditorium of the Greene Space were lined with 8.5-by-11-inch sheets of paper, each with one word scrawled across in varying degrees of legibility.

Juanjo Mena concluded his season-long exploration of Stravinsky ballets with a sharp account of the most famous, The Rite of Spring, as part of a programme of unusually grand proportions.It was a hundred years ago this month that the Rite received its première in Paris.

Snow is falling on the stage as the Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre presents a quite ambitious programme reworking two masterpieces of the ballet tradition: The Rite of Spring and Perushka.

Whilst a celebratory centenary performance of Stravinsky’s masterful The Rite of Spring has already been planned next month on the very evening of the work’s première, another performance of the work has recently captured the imagination of Paris’ music and dance aficionados: Stravinsky en mode hip hop (“Stravinsky, hip-hop style”).

Poor Ravel. He was expelled from the Conservatoire; he was consistently rejected for the Prix de Rome; he never married. Along with his contemporaries Stravinsky, Debussy and Satie, he made enormous strides in 20th-century music, but is unfortunately remembered best (when at all) for the plodding fifteen minutes of his 1928 composition Boléro.

One of the most well-known pieces of the twentieth-century classical repertoire is of course Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring.

Tonight’s concert was certainly one of the most unusual offered by the OSM in the Maison Symphonique thus far. It is indeed laudable for an orchestra to reach out to newer and younger audiences, and this is one of Kent Nagano’s strengths. Tonight’s presentation of the savage and revolutionary Le Sacre du Printemps alongside a new work for turntables and orchestra attempted to do just that.

The total timing of the music on the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s season premiere was barely an hour long. On the page the line-up looked strange. First half: Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte and the world premiere of a work by local composer Steven Stucky. The second half: Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

It is hard to imagine that many of the world’s major orchestras will begin their seasons this year with only three people on stage. Yet in this fascinating programme which promised much and never quite delivered, New York Philharmonic music director Alan Gilbert was joined under the proscenium arch only by timpanist Markus Rhoten and pianist Leif Ove Andsnes.