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WD_225/ 2005
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 3 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 25 x 19.9 | | Size (mm): | 640 x 510 | | Catalog #: | WD_0225 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
My music is best understood by children and animals.
-Igor Stravinsky/ www.rhino.com/store/classical/quotes.lasso
Igor Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" with Thomas Kelly.
Almost no musical work has had such a powerful influence or evoked as much controversy as Igor Stravinsky's ballet score “The Rite of Spring”. The work's premiere on May 29, 1913, at the Théatre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, was scandalous. In addition to the outrageous costumes, unusual choreography and bizarre story of pagan sacrifice, Stravinsky's musical innovations tested the patience of the audience to the fullest. In this edition of Milestones of the Millennium, we explore the history surrounding “The Rite of Spring,” its infamous premiere and its tremendous impact on music ever since.
One of Stravinsky's most significant collaborators was Serge Diaghilev, director of the Ballets Russes. The two were close working partners for some twenty years, until Diaghilev's death in 1929. Much of Stravinsky's most exceptional music, including the score for “The Rite of Spring,” was composed for the productions of Diaghilev. The first collaboration between the two Russians involved the ballet “Les Sylphides,” in which Diaghilev called upon various Russian composers to orchestrate several of Frédéric Chopin's compositions for piano. “Les Sylphides” is musically innocuous and foretells but little of the coming storm.
Harvard University professor Thomas Kelly suggests that one of the reasons that the Paris premiere of "The Rite of Spring" created such a furor was that it shattered everyone's expectations. The evening's program began innocently with a performance of “Les Sylphides.” However, as the follow-up piece, “The Rite of Spring” turned out to be anything but spring-like. One of the dancers recalled that Vaslav Nijinsky's shocking choreography was physically unnatural to perform. "With every leap we landed heavily enough to jar every organ in us." The music itself was angular, dissonant and totally unpredictable. In the introduction, Stravinksy called for a bassoon to play higher in its range than anyone else had ever done. In fact, the instrument was virtually unrecognizable as a bassoon. When the curtain rose and the dancing began, there appeared a musical theme without a melody, only a loud, pulsating, dissonant chord with jarring, irregular accents. The audience responded to the ballet with such a din of hisses and catcalls that the performers could barely hear each other.
Backstage at the premiere, Nijinsky shouted at the dancers while Diaghilev tried to suppress a possible riot by flashing the house lights. Stravinsky himself fumed at the audience's response to his music. If nothing else, the ballet's premiere managed to instill in the audience the true spirit of the music. As Thomas Kelly states, "The pagans on-stage made pagans of the audience." Despite its inauspicious debut, Stravinsky's score for “The Rite of Spring” today stands as a magnificent musical masterpiece of the twentieth century.
© 1999 by National Public Radio, Washington, D.C.
-www.npr.org/programs/specials/milestones/991110.motm.riteofspring.html
Bob Dylan - LIVE 1966, The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert--The Bootleg Series, vol. 4.
For more than 25 years, recordings of this extraordinary performance have circulated underground as a kind of Holy Grail for serious rock & roll collectors and Dylan enthusiasts alike. The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert -- which Mojo magazine (August 1998) called "The Most Famous Bootleg Album Of All Time" -- was actually recorded and performed on May 17, 1966, at Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England; the mystery behind the 30-year misidentification has never been completely resolved. Throughout the years, fans have clamored to replace worn-out vinyl and hissing popping CDs mixed from 3rd generation tapes. Now for the first time, the complete concert, including the sublime acoustic opening set, is available in pristine quality, freshly mixed and mastered from the original 3-track source tapes. None of these performances, with the exception of "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" (which appears on Biograph) has been legitimately available until now. This never-before-released complete concert recording (acoustic and electric sets) two-CD set features extensive liner notes including an essay by Tony Glover and many mind-blowing, previously unpublished photographs of Bob Dylan and The Hawks.
From Tony Glover's liner notes essay:
These two CDs document one of the great confrontational performances of the 20th century. Bob Dylan, intent on following his own inner vision, wasn't the first artist to NOT give the audience what they wanted, but he may have been the loudest.
In 1913, Russian composer Igor Stravinsky wrote music for "The Rite Of Spring" a Diaghilev ballet, choreographed by Nijinsky. His twelve-tone scales and use of unfamiliar structures caused not just a scandal, but rather a riot, as Parisian audiences stood and shouted, drowning out the orchestra. They considered Stravinski's score a "blasphemous attempt to destroy music as an art" and booed roundly throughout the piece.
In 1922, modern dancer Isadora Duncan began a tour with her husband, Russian poet Sergei Esenin, he read and she danced in auditoriums across the US. It was the height of the Red Scare, the powers-that-be were threatened by the bolshevik revolution of a few years before. When Duncan performed in Boston, she gave an impassioned speech, imploring a highly conservative audience- "you were once wild here, don't let them tame you!" When she waved a red scarf and bared a breast, declaring "nudity is truth, it is beauty, it is art!", the audience fled the hall.
In 1935, actor-director-writer Antonin Artaud performed his play "The Cenci", a dramatized myth of murder, incest and adultery, in Paris. Artaud had championed the "Theater Of Cruelty", where an audience was to be transformed through their encounter with his work. Settings were designed to disorient the spectator, recorded sound effects of trampling feet, an amplified metronome and tolling church bells were played through loudspeakers located in the four corners of the building and spectators were assaulted with macabre lighting effects. The play soon closed, and Artaud eventually wound up in an asylum.
In May of 1966, Bob Dylan stands on an English stage, coming back for the second half of a concert. The first part, done solo and acoustic, was well received, even though the lyrics were not the socially-conscious politically-motivating messages that had gained Dylan popularity barely a year before. Now he appears in a check houndstooth "rabbit" suit and pointed boots in front of a 5 piece band with an electric guitar in hand, playing incandescent rock and roll. There are catcalls throughout the set, and finally, just before the last number, someone yells "Judas!". Dylan replies, "I don't believe you!", turns to the band and snarls "play fucking loud!"--drummer Mickey Jones cracks the snare like a rifle shot and the Hawks roar into "Like A Rolling Stone". Dylan's voice is a velvet sneer as he shouts out the line "how does it feeeeeeel" and the performance rolls on with power, defiance and a sheer majesty rarely captured on tape.
By the time the first so-called "Royal Albert Hall" bootleg came out, some 4 or 5 years later, the mythology was in place: a blues-tinged Woody Guthrie comes out of the midwest, moves to NY, writes some poetic topical songs that become the soundtrack for the civil rights and anti-war struggles, turns inward and begins doing existentially surrealistic visionary work, hooks up with a kick-ass rock band, barnstorms the US and the Euro-continent, ends 4 months of grueling touring with a triumphant concert, returns to the US, breaks his neck in a motorcycle accident, and retires into a 20 month seclusion. When he returns, it's as a vastly changed man, a bearded biblical poet, with acoustic parables from a whole other century. So what happened, and why were those people so angry? Therein lies a tale...
-bobdylan.com/updates/bootleg.html
The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert.
Released October 13, 1998
Recorded May 17, 1966
Genre Rock
Length 1:35:18
Label Columbia
Producer(s) Jeff Rosen
Professional reviews
The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert is a live recording from Bob Dylan's legendary "world tour" in 1966. Released in 1998 after years of being bootlegged, it is widely regarded as an essential document in the development of popular music in the 1960s.
After touring North America from the fall of 1965 through the winter of 1966, Dylan, accompanied by The Hawks (later renamed as The Band), embarked on a six-week spring tour that began in Australia, wound through western Europe and the United Kingdom, and wrapped up in London. Dylan's move to electric music, and his apparent disconnection from traditional folk music, continued to be controversial, and his UK audiences were particularly disruptive.
A recording of this concert first surfaced in late 1970 or early 1971 on bootleg LPs with various titles. On June 3rd, 1971, critic Dave Marsh reviewed one bootleg in Creem magazine, writing "It is the most supremely elegant piece of rock 'n' roll music I've ever heard...The extreme subtlety of the music is so closely interwoven with its majesty that they appear as one and the same."
The same month, critic Jon Landau reviewed another edition of the concert: "Needless to say, the album is both musically great and an amazing path back into the temperament of the sixties. Listening to it, it isn't hard to remember Dylan on stage of the Donnally Memorial Theatre in Boston or at Forest Hills in New York standing toe to toe,eyeball to eyeball with Robbie Robertson between every verse of practically every song, while the guitarist played his fills. Nor is it hard to remember that long, lean,frail look that sometimes made you wonder what gave him the strength to stand up there in the first place, as he remembered the unbelievably complex lyrics to his unbelievably long songs, without ever faltering...It isn't hard for me to remember the booing, the names, the insults he endured just to be standing there with an electric band...On this album the audience claps at the wrong time, claps rhythmically as if to deliberately throw his timing off. At the beginning of 'One Too Many Mornings' he tells a completely psychotic story in a very low voice while the audience makes its noise. As they gradually lose their energy, he finds his and his voice gets louder, until, when they are almost completely silent he says plainly, 'if you only wouldn't clap so hard.' The audience applauds the statement."
The early bootleg LPs attributed the recording to one of Dylan's tour-closing concerts at London's Royal Albert Hall. However, Dylan's now-legendary confrontation with a heckler calling out "Judas" from the audience, clearly heard on the recording, was well-documented as having occurred at Manchester's Free Trade Hall on May 17, 1966. After years of conflicting reports and speculation among Dylan discographers, the Manchester source was verified after the preliminary mix of a proposed Columbia edition was bootlegged in 1995 as Guitars Kissing & The Contemporary Fix. Dylan rejected that edition; three years later, he authorized a markedly different version for his second "Bootleg Series" release.
When The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert finally saw released in 1998, it was a commercial and critical success, reaching #31 on the US charts and #19 in the UK.
One song from one of Dylan's actual Royal Albert Hall concerts, his May 26, 1966 performance of "Visions of Johanna", was previously released on Dylan's boxed-set retrospective Biograph in 1985. Excerpts from other 1966 UK performances are included in Martin Scorsese's 2005 television documentary No Direction Home.
On July 29, 1966, two months after finishing his spring tour, Dylan suffered a serious motorcycle accident. As a result of his long recuperation, Dylan had to cancel the remaining shows he had scheduled for 1966. However, Dylan would continue to collaborate with the Hawks, and over the next year or so, they would produce some of their most celebrated recordings, many of which were eventually released on The Basement Tapes.
Track listing: All songs by Bob Dylan, except where noted.
Disc 1 (solo acoustic):
1. "She Belongs To Me" - 3:27
2. "Fourth Time Around - 4:37
3. "Visions of Johanna" - 8:08
4. "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" - 5:45
5. "Desolation Row" - 11:31
6. "Just Like A Woman" - 5:52
7. "Mr. Tambourine Man" - 8:52
Disc 2 (Electric band):
1. "Tell Me, Momma" - 5:10
2. "I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)" - 6:07
3. "Baby, Let Me Follow You Down" (Trad. Arr. Dylan) - 3:46
4. "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" - 6:50
5. "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" - 4:50
6. "One Too Many Mornings" - 4:22
7. "Ballad Of A Thin Man" - 7:55
8. "Like A Rolling Stone" - 8:01
Personnel:
* Vic Anesini - Engineer
* Steven Berkowitz - Mixing
* Michael Brauer - Mixing
* Greg Calbi - Mastering
* Rick Danko - Bass, Vocals (bckgr)
* Bob Dylan - Guitar, Harmonica, Piano, Vocals
* Barry Feinstein - Photography
* David Gahr - Photography
* Geoff Gans - Art Direction
* Tony Glover - Liner Notes
* Garth Hudson - Organ
* Don Hunstein - Photography
* Mickey Jones - Drums
* Art Kane - Photography
* Paul Kelly - Photography
* Richard Manuel - Piano
* Hank Parker - Photography
* Jan Persson - Photography
* Robbie Robertson - Guitar
* Jeff Rosen - Producer
* Jerry Schatzberg - Photography
* Sandy Speiser - Photography
* Mark Wilder - Editing
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