Stravinsky in the air

At last, at long last the Bad Plus is performing their arrangement of Igor Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" in New York! Tomorrow, August 2nd, for free, at Lincoln Center's Out of Doors concert series.
As we approach the 100th anniversary of this still-badass masterpiece, I'm looking forward to a lot of "Rite" and Stravinsky related activities. The Carolina Performing Arts has launched a website dedicated to celebrating and exploring "The Rite". There are some great commentaries from composers about their encounters with the piece.
I've been reading Stephen Walsh's biography of Stravinsky and listening to his works in (mostly) chronological order. I've decided that things really get interesting for me at "Petrushka".
I also finally got around to reading "The Apollonian Clockwork", a kind of free-form collection of essays about Stravinsky by composers Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schonberger. This book lives up to the praise heaped upon it by countless musicians and critics. My favorite quote about the book is from Stravinsky scholar Richard Taruskin: "The one book about Stravinsky that Stravinsky would have liked."
Thank god for the Performing Arts Library, they have 3 copies of this rare book. It fetches a high price on Amazon.

The Bad Plus "On Sacred Ground"

Now isn't this an exciting development! The Bad Plus are going to perform an arrangement of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" at Duke University with an accompanying multi-media presentation by an architect and a filmmaker. I can only hope that a performance in New York will follow soon. My imagination is already going haywire.
Ethan Iverson talks about the project in this interview, and I was very taken by his response about why they chose the piece:

"Of all the modernist classical music, The Rite is the "hit." With most of our covers, we don't go for the deep tracks, but the obvious choices."

I love the idea of The Rite being a "hit." It also got me thinking how The Rite was the first piece of modernist classical music that I probably ever heard, along with many other unsuspecting children watching Disney's "Fantasia" for the first time. I clearly remember being terrified of the brutal prehistoric landscape during The Rite section of the film. I just watched it again on Youtube. Really awesome.