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Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943)
Suite No. 1 for Two Pianos, Op. 5 (1900)
i. Barcarolle

Ian Cusson (b. 1981)
New Work / Commission (2026)

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Arnold Bax (1883–1953)
The Poisoned Fountain (1918)

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971)
The Rite of Spring (arr. Stravinsky, for two pianos) (1913)

i. The Adoration of the Earth
Introduction
Augurs of Spring
Ritual of Abduction
Spring Rounds
Ritual of the Rival Tribes
Procession of the Sage: The Sage
Dance of the Earth

ii. The Sacrifice
Introduction
Mystic Circles of the Young Girls
Glorification of the Chosen One
Evocation of the Ancestors
Ritual Action of the Ancestors
Sacrificial Dance

In Rites Reclaimed, water shimmers, land awakens, and beneath it all lies the question of what must be taken, offered, or destroyed for life to continue. The works you will hear tonight demonstrate that beauty and unease, innocence and danger, ritual and renewal exist side by side, often indistinguishable from one another. Nature echoes our drive to create and renew, and the lives and forces such acts consume, showing how creation and destruction are inevitably bound together.

Sergei Rachmaninoff opens the program with the Barcarolle from Fantasie-Tableaux, a cycle originally conceived as four poetic scenes and dedicated to Tchaikovsky. Inspired by verses of Mikhail Lermontov, the music evokes dusk, water, and love already receding into memory. Its gently rocking rhythm recalls the gondola songs familiar from Mendelssohn, but Rachmaninoff expands the genre with a broader melodic span and a darker harmonic weight. In the two-piano texture, one instrument carries a sweeping, lyrical line while the other traces rippling figures that shimmer beneath it. As the music opens into a glowing G major, the sound becomes lush and expansive. When the opening material returns in G minor, intensified and more volatile, its romance feels unsettled, as if beauty itself has begun to sour.

Ian Cusson’s Return of the Light responds directly to Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, but from a radically different ethical stance. With a scenario by Yvette Nolan, the work unfolds around the winter solstice. Villagers gather for a communal meal as elders recount the story of a hunter who kills more animals than he needs, mistaking excess for strength and glory. The elders chastise him for his arrogance and for his failure to acknowledge the animals’ gift of life. The piece moves from winter darkness toward renewal, not through sacrifice or domination, but with gratitude, restraint, and the recognition that survival depends on listening to what the land withholds and what it offers.

Arnold Bax’s The Poisoned Fountain returns to myth, but with far more ominous implications. Its title evokes the Secret Well of Segais, the magically guarded source of all knowledge presided over by the water-god Nectan, whose waters rose up to pursue and drown Nectan’s wife when she defied its danger, forming the river Boyne. Bax opens with a whispering, unstable figure in the first piano, marked extremely soft and detached from the second piano’s pulse, suggesting an enchanted surface that refuses to settle. Against it, the second piano enters with a slow, stark line that feels ancient and immovable. The result is a tension between allure and threat, a sound world in which fascination leads inexorably toward destruction: transgression punished, knowledge extracted at a cost, and violence directed toward the vulnerable.

The two-piano version of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring offers a rare vantage point into the creation of one of the twentieth century’s defining masterpieces. Its 1913 Paris premiere famously ignited a riot with its rhythmic ferocity, harmonic audacity, and mythic depiction of pagan ritual and sacrifice. Composed largely at the keyboard, this version exposes the music’s raw structure with startling clarity. Its relentless rhythms and obsessive repetitions enact a ritual that culminates in the sacrifice of a chosen woman, her death presented as necessary for communal renewal. Heard after Cusson and Bax, the work’s brutality feels less mythic and more pointed, raising questions about whose bodies are offered and consumed so that others may endure.