Brazilian-flavoured Rite of Spring opens the Holland Festival

Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring is no stranger to riot so it was fitting that a small one broke out as a mass children’s outdoor event in Amsterdam’s Westerpark collided with Thursday night’s opening of the Holland Festival and the arrival of a royal motorcade. The screams of the police outrider whistles were matched by shrieks of prepubescent glee unbound at the arrival of members of the House of Orange. Thankfully the atmosphere was calmer inside the magnificent Gashouder, the jewel in the Westerpark’s crown.

This year’s Holland Festival has a distinctly Brazilian flavour, thanks to the presence of associate artist Christiane Jatahy, film-maker, director and writer, whose touching short film of indigenous women and children in the Brazilian rainforest accompanied American composer Caroline Shaw’s opening piece Music in Common Time. Using the Cappella Amsterdam like a synthesised sunrise, Shaw’s piece opens as a slow glissando vocalise, to which the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra joined with a wide open tonality reminiscent of Copland’s settler aesthetic, though the images of Kayapo women and children bathing remind us what permanence might look like. It’s a beautiful piece of music that makes much of a simple arpeggio structure in sustained chords that settle across the orchestra like bands of colour, contrasted with pizzicato that begins as playful, becomes more abstract and conversational, threatening to interrupt the sustained harmonic flow.

The formidable control of the orchestra's Chief Conductor, Karina Canellakis, meant that no detail was lost to the spacious dome of the Gashouder in an exhilarating opening night rendition of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, again accompanied by film, this time by Evangelia Kranioti, originally commissioned by the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence. Although some film projections can distract from a live performance, Kranioti’s, which explores the contrasts of contemporary Brazil from cabana to motorway, from indigenous rite to carnival, beauty to violence, reawakens the extraordinary extremity of Stravinsky’s original score.

The concert ended with Frank Ticheli’s Earth Song with the choir singing from the middle of the audience and projected onto the screen ahead so that we could see ourselves alongside them, a brilliant gesture of welcome and inclusion that made the choir’s spellbinding rendition feel both intimate and empowering.