Reimagining Les Noces: Colors of the New Russia

The first chord of Stravinsky’s Les Noces, with its unabashed unprepared dissonance that propels the work into a 25-minute long thrill ride, is a sound unlike anything else in the 20^th century repertoire. No E has ever been as clear as the first note of this bridal lament ringing above a sweet cacophony of pianos and cymbals—colors fly from the orchestra pit and the corps-de-ballet stands stock still in a hieratic pose strikingly reminiscent of one of Rublev’s icons. With this single note, Stravinsky begins his crystallization of an entire period of Russian history: the Tsar has been murdered, the Metropolitan driven underground, and a whole nation thrown into unrest as a result of the February revolution. Les Noces is the black-and-white photograph of his entire heritage that Stravinsky carries in his lapel pocket throughout the rest of his career. It is a lament for Mother Russia herself.

Stravinsky’s difficulties in settling on the work’s orchestration are common knowledge now—originally desiring to write the piece for a super-orchestra of 150 musicians, he went through several different instrumentations trying to settle on the right sound world for this musical icon. Eventually he discovered the arrangement that made the work famous: four grand pianos, and two percussion ensembles (pitched and unpitched) that together capture the then-fading sounds of the great Russian church bells that were quickly becoming a distant memory.

The Soviet regime has since fallen, the wall has been torn down, and a new generation of Slavs (and Slavophiles) has ushered Russia into a season of rebirth and rediscovery. In light of this it’s only fitting that musicians would revisit Les Noces. In 2010 Steven Stucky re-orchestrated the entire ballet, taking cues from the remaining scraps of the version for mega-orchestra to create a colorful, evocative rendering of what was originally a stark, industrial machine. The re-orchestrated version received its European premiere with a riveting performance by the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of John Adams in late 2010 (the video is linked below).

Listeners familiar with the idiosyncratic sonorities of the original Les Noces will find an at once unsettling yet ensorceling reimagining of the peasant wedding festivities. The piercing, biting sonorities once rendered on pianos become soft, almost ethereal with the sustained tones and subtle inflections of orchestral forces, as if the peasant wedding has been moved from an impoverished village to the fantastic forest of the Firebird. The work doesn’t lose an ounce of its Russianness in translation, partly due to Stucky’s masterful handling of the same orchestral forces as Stravinsky would have had and the delicate, note-perfect performance by the orchestra. One could almost see the spectral figures of Stravinsky’s earlier world of myth and magic coalescing before their eyes.

The performance is not without its hiccups, however; the chorus is far too distant from the conductor and the audience to stay in perfect synchronization with the orchestra, which leads to a mess of mushy Russian. Perhaps this is a defect of the performance space itself; in the original ballet version, the ensemble, chorus, and soloists are all shoe-horned into the orchestra pit. The performance also suffered from a couple of missed entrances by the soloists, who, although capable singers seemed to be hampered by the present uncomfortable stage arrangement (and an unfortunate wardrobe choice by tenor Marcel Beekman). As much as it may appear to be a sweeping epic, Les Noces requires chamber-level sensitivity to rhythm and balance. Adams’ drum major precision kept the orchestra on the rails, resulting in a vivacious, kaleidoscopic performance in much the same sound world as City Noir (which was the program’s finale).

Stucky has said of his edition that he wasn’t seeking to create what Stravinsky would create with the same resources, only that he was attempting to create his own spin on the music. Whether his motives are legitimate or not are yet to be determined, but an important transition has occurred for Les Noces and its legacy: where it was once an elegy to the loss of a homeland and a cultural identity, it now stands as a colorized, gold-leafed icon of the reality of the Russian experience. Without question, Stucky’s orchestration is as culturally important for the emerging Russia as Stravinsky’s original realization.

(In this video, the performance of Les Noces starts around 33:00.)