Program Notes: Stravinsky The Rite of Spring

BRIAN RAPHAEL NABORS 
Upon Daybreak 
BORN: 1991, in Birmingham, Alabama 
WORK COMPOSED: 2022 
WORLD PREMIERE: October 16, 2022, by Berkeley Symphony, in Berkeley, California. 

What to Listen For:  

• A musical gesture the composer calls “air beatboxing” can be heard in the flute at the work’s outset — more air than pitch — and after the orchestra builds to a climax, it launches into what Nabors has described as the “freedom theme,” which is threaded throughout Upon Daybreak while bringing it all together. 

A musical gesture the composer calls “air beatboxing” can be heard in the flute at the work’s outset — more air than pitch — and after the orchestra builds to a climax, it launches into what Nabors has described as the “freedom theme,” which is threaded throughout Upon Daybreak while bringing it all together. 

“For many years I’ve sat and contemplated what music in a world without hatred or malice would sound like,” Brian Raphael Nabors wrote in his program note about Upon Daybreak. “I imagine this picturesque utopia with sound that engulfs the listener with abundant joy; an everlasting serenade; an ode of triumph.” 

Composed in 2022, Upon Daybreak is an orchestral work with many commissioning partners, including the Seattle Symphony, and was made possible through New Music USA’s Amplifying Voices program. Nabors was inspired by one of his creative idols, Dr. Maya Angelou, and her poem “A Brave, Startling Truth” (1995), written in honor of the 50th anniversary of the United Nations, an institution founded for one goal: world peace. His childhood in Alabama — fishing with his father, growing up surrounded by nature — also informed the harmonic character and energy of the work.  

Nabors spent much time finding a way to set the poem effectively; where he arrived was an instrumental, rhapsodic form, whose polyphonic, prickly and consonant texture is consistently buoyant. Rather than building his composition upon a primary and secondary melody, Nabors works more with motives. His musical episodes are inspired by specific verses of Angelou’s poem, maintaining a sense of drive and development without bogging down the orchestral texture. Of note is a brief, beautiful middle section centering the lushness and pathos of the strings. Calling for a smaller orchestral ensemble, with a light, neoclassical texture and pastoral expression, it’s hard not relate this work to Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring or Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis: two works different in style, but which communicate a powerful emotional position.   

As he puts it, Nabors hears Upon Daybreak as a work of optimism, a way to envision a state of being that remains elusive but no less yearned for: “I am filled with great awe at the thought of finally arriving at the great ‘day of peacemaking’ which she describes so beautifully. What a glorious day that will be ‘when we come to it.’” 

A. Kori Hill © 2025 

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART 
Piano Concerto No. 22 in E-flat major, K.482 
BORN: January 27, 1756, in Salzburg 
DIED: December 5, 1791, in Vienna 
WORK COMPOSED: 1785 
WORLD PREMIERE: December 16, 1785, in Vienna, with Mozart as soloist 

What to Lisen For:  

• In the melancholic second movement Andante, Mozart foreshadows how he would depict the despair of the Countess in Le nozze di Figaro, which premiered the following year. 

In the melancholic second movement Andante, Mozart foreshadows how he would depict the despair of the Countess in Le nozze di Figaro, which premiered the following year. 

In 1785, four years after establishing himself in Vienna, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had achieved a high degree of financial success. That very year, Franz Joseph Haydn proclaimed to Wolfgang’s father that “your son is the greatest composer I know personally or by reputation.” Yet despite having ascended to the apogee of his popularity, Mozart found himself stymied by the less than cordial reaction accorded to such landmark works as his Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor. Here and elsewhere, the turbulence and dark emotion of his output at that time puzzled the Viennese, who wanted to be entertained by light-hearted, galant music that didn’t stir up roiling passions. Worse, Mozart’s recklessness with money jeopardized his financial security, even considering his high repute. In hopes of remedying the situation, Mozart began work on his Piano Concerto No. 22 in E-flat major, which he filled with grace, sweeping lyricism and gleaming majesty — ingredients designed to woo back his fickle Viennese audience.  

The opening Allegro announces itself with a regal theme of faintly martial character that is quickly answered by bassoons and horns. Several more thematic snippets emerge before the soloist enters and leads the movement into a second exposition. Brilliant woodwind coloration and coruscating passagework on the piano combine to create a glittering, sun-lit musical journey occasionally and effectively highlighted by occasional suggestions of stormy weather.  

The emotional heart of the E-flat concerto is its poignant Andante, filled with melancholy and growing out of a touching theme uttered by muted violins. This is Mozart at his most touchingly human and foreshadows how he would depict the despair of the Countess in Le nozze di Figaro of the following year. The buoyant rondo finale sweeps away all suggestions of unhappiness; its primary recurring theme suggests the festive nature of the hunt (not festive, of course, for the prey!). Even a tender episode in the nature of a romanza cannot dim the essential high spirits of this movement.  

Steven Lowe © 2007, revised 2025 

IGOR STRAVINSKY 
Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring)  
BORN: June 5, 1882, in Oranienbaum, Russia 
DIED: April 6, 1971, in New York 
WORK COMPOSED: 1911–1913 
WORLD PREMIERE: May 29, 1913, in Paris, with Pierre Monteux conducting the orchestra of the Ballets Russes. 

What to Listen For:  

• Depicting the ritual sacrifice of a virgin in prehistoric pagan Russia, Stravinsky’s ballet brought together ancient folk elements with shocking new sounds from the orchestra. 

Depicting the ritual sacrifice of a virgin in prehistoric pagan Russia, Stravinsky’s ballet brought together ancient folk elements with shocking new sounds from the orchestra. 

Only a handful of compositions can properly be called epochal, works in which the entire course of music seems to turn in a new and unforeseen direction. Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, though not the first piece to express a modernist sensibility, nevertheless stands as a landmark in the emergence of a novel musical sensibility. Its thrilling rhythms, hypnotic phrases, audacious discords and assertive orchestration represented a radical break with the past when they first appeared, and they exerted an enormous influence on a succeeding generation of composers. 

It seems appropriate that the inspiration for this visionary composition should have come to its creator in a vision. This occurred in the spring of 1910, as Stravinsky was finishing work on his ballet, The Firebird. Perhaps his preoccupation with the ancient, mythical world of its story made him particularly susceptible to intimations from the distant past. In any event, the composer experienced a fleeting daydream of a scene out of Russian pre-history. “I saw in imagination,” he recalled, “a solemn pagan rite: wise elders, seated in a circle, watching a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring.” 

Stravinsky related this vision to Sergei Diaghilev, director of the Paris-based Ballets Russes company, who immediately wanted to base a ballet on it. But the composer was not certain how to approach his subject in musical terms, and he began instead to compose the music that eventually grew into another ballet, Petrushka. Diaghilev, however, continued to urge Stravinsky to produce his “pagan rite” music, and in the summer of 1911, the composer at last set to work. The score was completed in early March 1913 and first performed a few months later. 

The Paris premiere of The Rite of Spring proved to be a defining moment in the aesthetic wars of the early modern era, igniting a near riot in the audience. Some of the controversy was provoked by the sets and choreography, but the principal point of contention was Stravinsky’s contribution. According to one eyewitness, “a certain part of the audience was [outraged] by what it considered a blasphemous attempt to destroy music as an art, and, swept away with wrath, began very soon after the rise of the curtain to make catcalls and to offer audible suggestions as to how the performance should proceed. The orchestra played unheard, except when a slight lull occurred. The figures on the stage danced in time to music they had to imagine they heard and beautifully out of time with the uproar in the audience.” 

Despite this daunting baptism, The Rite of Spring became one of the most highly regarded compositions of the last century. The ease with which Stravinsky’s music has made the transition from ballet stage to concert hall is due in part to the fairly indefinite nature of its choreographic scenario. While a brief outline of this is given in the headings of the various sections of the score, The Rite of Spring may perhaps most profitably be heard in general rather than specific programmatic terms, as a hymn to the violence and mystery of nature rather than as an aural depiction of particular scenes that have been choreographed to it.  

In this respect, a remark Stravinsky made late in his life seems particularly revealing. When asked what he most loved about Russia, the composer answered: “The violent Russian spring that seemed to begin in an hour and was like the whole earth cracking. That was the most wonderful event of every year of my childhood.” 

Paul Schiavo © 2014, revised 2025