Aurora Orchestra's The Rite of Spring

When Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring premiered in Paris in 1913, the audience didn't just object. They rioted. The music was too strange, too violent, too unlike anything heard before. A century later, the work remains one of the most viscerally powerful pieces in the orchestral canon.

This filmed concert, recorded at the Helsinki Festival in August 2023, captures Aurora Orchestra doing something no orchestra had ever done: performing the complete Rite of Spring entirely from memory. Under conductor Nicholas Collon, the musicians are liberated from the page, free to move, to regroup, to expose the architecture of Stravinsky's score from the inside.

The first half sets the scene. Actors Charlotte Ritchie and Karl Queensborough voice the words of Stravinsky and his collaborators, tracing the work's origins and its scandalous reception. Theatrical lighting, projection, and staging shape what becomes a dramatised portrait of the piece, not just an introduction to it.

The second half is the performance itself, given in full and from memory, with all the directness and intensity that entails.

Directed for television by Ilmari Aho, this is a production that treats classical music as a live art form with real stakes. The result is cinema that belongs in any serious broadcast schedule.