“He is a Barbarian endowed with every commodity” said Debussy of his friend Stravinsky. And indeed, reaching the right blend of science and savagery may be the major difficulty when it comes to Rite of Spring. As prompted Leonard Bernstein: “This piece used to be considered practically unplayable back in 1913 and through the 20s and into the 30s”. How does one tackle this mixture of brute force and refinement, of telluric quakes and melodies? How to apprehend these rhythms so foreign to Western music and puzzled even Pierre Boulez? On what undiscovered part of the globe can these – sometimes creaky – tributes to folkloric Slavic music be taken?

Everyone remembers the outrage when the work first premiered with the Ballets Russes at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées: a pitched battle… spiraling into a battle with no pitch at all – and becoming one of the greatest artistic scandals of the 20th Century. Yet in spite of its famed difficulty, the music echoes a pulsation so profound, so primary that Rite of Spring has eventually become a classic of both music and dance, inspiring choreographers as diverse as Martha Graham, Maurice Béjart, Pina Bausch, Angelin Preljocaj…

Israel Galván destabilizes with a regularity of his own, offering shows both joyous and austere, provoking without any deliberate provocation all sorts of shivers and quakes. The expression of a freedom both inspired as ingenuous, and of a trajectory which cultivates continuity in ruptures, and logically pursues its course with Stravinsky. Guided by the two pianists, Galván is seen here for the first time confronted to a music score... Which does mean not that everything is already written. To these three intrepid artists, to these seekers of untold stories, Rite of Spring offers the most seductive dangers. And they are set on exposing the musical colossus to reveal its freaky bones, which defy all laws of musical anatomy. Moreover, they’re trying to recapture the essence, the music before the paper. Finding novelty, while respecting the text will thus be a new kind of madness… (Lola Gruber)