Change of seasons, meteorological and musical: ISO opens 2026-27 with 'The Rite of Spring'

Original costume designs for "The Rite of Spring" 

Lots of risers in the orchestra, lots of youth in the audience. 

Clearly something outsize and extra-inviting was on hand Friday night when the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra opened the 2026-27 season at Hilbert Circle Theatre.

With the program having been already finely honed in performance the night before at Indiana University, the ISO under music director Jun Märkl was especially primed to respond to the historic, perpetually challenging demands of Igor Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." The 1913 ballet has been  known since almost exclusively as an orchestral showpiece, without any choreography except that conjured up in listeners' heads. 

The scenario of the ballet lent the young composer a form, culminating in a virgin's fatal sacrifice to propitiate the gods. The prehistoric Russia evoked suggested that the Ballets Russes creators' enduring innovation would be primarily musical and convulsively rhythmic. Vaslav Nijinsky's choreography, not especially sensitive to music, was in a world of its own.

The score's link to nature — the onslaught of spring, which Stravinsky remembers from his Russian childhood as like a loud crack in the cosmos — would be intensely religious, setting aside the composer's lifelong devotion to Orthodox Christianity. Staging a vision of pagan Russia thus required a huge imaginative leap. Stravinsky was never willing to put art in place of the religion he revered, later declaring "it is high time to put an end, once and for all, to this unseemly and sacrilegious conception of art as religion."

In a statement written at the time the ballet premiered, the composer described his composition's opening as expressing "the fear of nature before the arising of beauty, a sacred terror in the midday sun, a sort of pagan cry." The way the ISO launched its performance Friday was fully in sync with this view. "Each instrument is like a bud which grows on the bark of an aged tree," Stravinsky wrote. Initially, Ivy Ringel's bassoon solo, a milestone in the orchestral literature for her instrument, had the right budding splendor, and the ensuing few minutes of the piece sent aloft the pagan cry the composer must have had in mind.

In 2013, in a wide-ranging celebration of "The Rite of Spring" at 100 years old, I wrote for this blog an essay on the work and what it has meant to me and to many aspects of the world it influenced. You'll find there the jaundiced perspective of the conductor who led the premiere and the violence Stravinsky connected with the actual Russian spring, as well as the relevance of a Wallace Stevens poem. (Try to keep your triskaidekaphobia at bay. Elvis A. Presley has left the building.)

Friday's performance was remarkable for the balance Märkl elicited from the immense forces in front of him. He was attentive to the prominence of melody in the 35-minute score, which has the reputation of a relentless assault on the senses. In the second part the becalmed mysticism Stravinsky worked to present moved front and center, just in time to set up the danger, doom, and ritual significance of the Sacrificial Dance. In Friday's performance, there was a faintly amusing bit of audience participation in the form of a cough during the momentary pause before the final upward sweep to the final chord. Otherwise everyone was spellbound with bated breath throughout.

The concert opened with a familiar foreshadowing of the holiday to come next month: Modest Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain." Folk beliefs of a more recent Russia than the one Stravinsky had in mind inspired a tone poem about the visit of evil spirits descending from a well-known peak. Another comparison is apt: the orchestration used here and with near universality is that of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, a major Russian composer who was a crucial influence on Stravinsky in three major ballets, culminating in "The Rite of Spring." The ISO's performance had a nicely judged tension and release that Stravinsky's music traces in its own fashion. And there was some standout wind soloing, particularly from clarinet and flute.

Spencer Myer, ISO guest soloist

Beethoven  piano concertos are a feature of the season launched this weekend, as Märkl told the audience. This weekend's, No. 4 in G major, is perhaps his most beloved, if we cede greater grandeur to the Third and Fifth ("Emperor"). Spencer Myer, who won the 2006 American Piano Awards here and now heads the IU piano department, was the soloist. In the first movement his clarity and controlled momentum, never rushing, were exemplary. The solo cadenzas in the first and third movements carried an apt variety of expression.

Much of the commentary and interpretation of this work focuses on the second movement,  Andante con moto. There are two ways to interpret the memorable contrast between the solo and its accompaniment. Predominant is the strong implication that the piano is rejecting the commanding presence of the orchestra by making a gentle counter-statement. After a back-and-forth that seems entrenched, the piano wins over the hostile orchestra. 

The other way, also attractive and pursued notably by the late Alfred Brendel, has the piano settled in its own world, in effect ignoring the authoritative orchestra until what creates the eventual partnership is simply a matter of finding common ground, almost by accident. 

Myer was a good representative of the former approach: His counter-statement at the keyboard, almost eerily soft and slow, seemed to say, "This is what I'm feeling and what you should feel too. Try it, you'll like it." Either way seems valid to me, and Myer and the orchestra certainly fell with style into the camp of Orpheus taming the wild beasts. For the guest soloist's encore, the calm became otherworldly with his glowing account of Debussy's "Claire de Lune."