Circumnavigating the ban on orchestral music-making, a group of 34 performers have met virtually to perform the ‘Sacrificial Dance’ from Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.
The musicians, who are members of the Swiss Ensemble Symphonique Neuchâtel, perform while locked in individual lightboxes.
- Read: Review of The Rite of Spring | Stravinsky’s formidable work meets the Bharatanatyam school of dance
The Rite of Spring is a ballet and orchestral work written for the 1913 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company. Depicting various primitive rituals celebrating the advent of spring, it was extremely novel for its time, including experiments in tonality, metre, rhythm, stress and dissonance. That helps to explain why, at its Paris premiere, it provoked rioting amongst its audience members. Among the more hostile press reviews was that of Le Figaro’s critic Henri Quittard, who called the work ‘a laborious and puerile barbarity’, adding ‘We are sorry to see an artist such as M. Stravinsky involve himself in this disconcerting adventure.’
According to the American musicologist and music critic Richard Taruskin, ‘it was not Stravinsky’s music that did the shocking. It was the ugly earthbound lurching and stomping devised by Vaslav Nijinsky.’
The hostility continued: even the composer Giacomo Puccini, who attended a later performance on 2 June,described the choreography as ridiculous and the music cacophonous—’the work of a madman. The public hissed, laughed—and applauded.’
Nonetheless, The Rite of Spring went on to achieve fame as one of the most iconic works of the 20th century, and has been performed in all sorts of unique ways over the years.
According to the ensemble in this lightbox performance, ‘Each musician has been recorded individually and generated his own visual pattern in real time.’ 
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