Igor Stravinsky, 1929 (photograph by F. Man via Wikimedia Commons)

Perséphone is a challenging work. Despite the pastoral setting of its first tableau, the fragmentation of text and discontinuities in the orchestral narrative can be alienating for the listener, and the performance on Thursday night took time to gel, only really finding its stride with the more concerted music of the second tableau, Perséphone aux enfers. Here, Stravinsky surprises us with tender lyricism, seemingly at odds with its infernal setting. A compassionate Persephone exchanges her tales of life in flowery meadows with the chorus of shades’ calm explanations of the cyclic sameness of their existence. In a clear precursor of musical minimalism, the hypnotic, almost mechanistic repetitions and rocking rhythms convey the sense of unending timelessness that constitutes their ‘hell’. The lyrical flow continues into Perséphone renaissante, as the goddess (and spring) are reborn, with the addition of luminous dramatic effects in both sound and silence.

Despite the limitations of a concert performance the action was absorbing, its narrative thread conveyed by surtitles that facilitated appreciation of the score. Stravinsky’s delicate music caressed the French text, whether spoken or sung, prefiguring the nuanced underscoring of speech in the best of Hollywood melodramas. The musico-theatrical genre characterised by declaimed speech with musical accompaniment lacks a clear modern tradition and is difficult to translate to Melbourne in 2019. Talented young mezzo soprano Lotte Betts-Dean had to create her composed, almost restrained Persephone without obvious declamatory models that might have suggested a more sonorous vocal projection and heightened dramatic presence. As Eumolpus, tenor Paul Groves performed the difficult part of the priest-narrator with admirable gravitas and suitable authority, despite a hint of strain in the upper register. The orchestra realised fully the timbral qualities described by Robert Craft as ‘in a very special sense “beautiful” and extremely delicate’. Rounded tones from the MSO Chorus gained an innocent, radiant lustre with the contribution of the Australian Girls Choir and National Boys Choir of Australia to the final tableau. An extended, rapt, silence greeted the work’s hushed close, giving way to sustained applause for all performers.

Lotte Betts-Dean (Perséphone) and  Paul Groves (Eumolpus) as part of the MSO's Stravinsky Double Bill (photograph by Laura Manariti)

Although the common element of ritual finds expression in both Stravinsky’s responses to spring, the contrast in energy and timbral palette could not be more pronounced, from the ‘innumerable gradations of grey and mother-of-pearl’ discerned in Perséphone by André Boucourechliev, to the vibrant, primitivist hues of the Rite of Spring. This notorious work has been subject to many and varied readings in the century of its existence. Re-imagined by Stravinsky himself as the conductor of recordings spanning several decades, it was entwined with the minimalist aesthetic and ideal of recorded perfection in the latter part of the twentieth century, and has even been subjected to neo-Romantic interpretations in more recent times.

Davis directed an exuberant rendition of the Rite, which just got better as the work unfolded. Always in control, he was in joyous accord with his impressively augmented orchestra. The vast array of woodwind, brass, and percussion players rose to the challenge of this perennial showpiece, and Davis also drew a performance of precision and verve from the more contained string section. An occasional lack of exactness, as heard in the mad dash to the end of part I, paralleled Stravinsky’s readiness to sacrifice this quality in search of the right musical gesture or articulation. Mounting energy and buoyant asymmetrical rhythms drove the final Sacrificial Dance to a breathtaking climax.

Andrew Davis conducts The Rite of Spring as part of the MSO's Stravinsky Double Bill (photograph by Laura Manariti)

While this memorable concert embraced themes of death and rebirth, it was also a revelation of Stravinsky’s capacity for regeneration as a composer. Andrew Davis and the MSO must be congratulated on their persuasive performance of these Stravinskian gems, one unknown, the other familiar, but always new.

The Stravinsky Double Bill was performed by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and was conducted by Andrew Davis in Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne. Performance attended: 18 July 2019.