It is the centennial of the premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, with all the accompanying fanfare, and the reek of hyperbole can make it hard for a sober person to read a concert program. Rite was, according to American conductor Marin Alsop, “the most complex music ever conceived.” “You can hear everything in it,” the Russian conductor Vladimir Jurowski said. Leonard Bernstein called it “the most important piece of music of the 20th century” and this retrospective sentiment of the instant masterpiece has gone down as smoothly and comfortingly as if Rite floated across the Atlantic
like a digestive biscuit on the first merit-powered ocean crossing.