Stravinsky and Bartók share a single concert on the Main Stage at Covent Garden on Friday 2 April 2027.
Two works written within two years of each other, both about violence, and neither of them behaving like anything before it. Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring was first danced in Paris in May 1913 and caused the most famous disturbance in the history of concert-going: a pagan spring rite ending in a girl dancing herself to death, set to rhythms that nobody in the hall had a way of counting. It changed what an orchestra was allowed to sound like.
Bartók composed Duke Bluebeard’s Castle in 1911 and could not get it staged for seven years. It is a one-act opera for two singers and an orchestra, after Perrault by way of Béla Balázs: a new wife opens seven doors in her husband’s castle, and behind each is something she cannot unsee. Nothing happens on stage. Everything happens in the pit. Bartók entered it for two Hungarian competitions and both juries rejected it as unperformable, which is the same verdict Paris reached about the Rite from the other direction, by shouting.
They are given together, unstaged, on the Main Stage at Covent Garden on Friday 2 April 2027, one night only. In concert is arguably the honest way to take both: the Rite has not needed its choreography for a century, and Bluebeard is a psychological interior that a set can only literalise.