“Revolutions” is the first word in the title of the Hirshhorn’s 50th anniversary exhibition, which features work from the Museum’s unparalleled collection and covers the tumultuous period in art from1860–1960. Planning a season to celebrate the 50th anniversary, there was one work that simply had to be heard: Stravinsky’s earth-shattering “Rite of Spring,” composed at almost the exact midpoint of the exhibition’s 100-year span.
It is the period’s inevitable act of artistic revolution. Its composition presaged by only a year—in retrospect almost seemed to cause—the collapse of the world order with world wars, the advent of modernism, and the mid-century revolution of fascism. Noting resonances bouncing between those times and these, the curators of the exhibition (and of this evening’s program) might be forgiven for wondering if we are in another such period of collapse and revolution.
The painter Pablo Picasso holds a place at the center of modernism in the visual arts (compassed by “Revolutions”); for music during the same period, Stravinsky claims the parallel place. And, in fact, Picasso worked with Stravinsky—and they both shared Coco Chanel’s milieu. All three (plus Lili Boulanger) were prominent players in the Parisian period that incubated the modernist revolution.
In programming Stravinsky’s “Rite” with composer Scott Wheeler’s premiere of his cabaret song cycle (inventively based on the words and thoughts of Coco Chanel), we have a study in contrasts between the essential lyricism of Scott’s cabaret style, and how music critic Alex Ross described Stravinsky having “proceeded to pulverize [traditional Russian folks tunes] into motivic bits, pile them up in layers, and reassemble them in cubistic collages….”
The complementary pair of works on the program, also a century apart, represent another antithesis: Lili Boulanger, a lyrical, rather wistful voice from a century before Mikhail Johnson’s reworking of traditional Jamaican elements in a fortuitous, virtuoso mash-up of “fashion” and dark times.
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Igor and Coco
at 5pm on Saturday February 12025
Hirshhorn Museum’s Ring Auditorium – a program designed around a new Scott Wheeler work based on the words of Coco Chanel, noting the feminist icon’s ties to Picasso and Stravinsky and including the piano four-hands version of that composer’s revolutionary Rite of Spring.
Read the printed program now for this concert.- Mikhail Johnson
- Ton Yo Han Mek Fashan
- Scott Wheeler
- A Woman of Her Time: Coco Chanel Sings (world premiere)
- Lili Boulanger
- D’un matin de printemps
- Igor Stravinsky
- Le sacre du printemps