Sylvie Courvoisier & Cory Smythe

Featuring a stunning version of the iconic composition paired with Courvoisier’s newly composed improvisation-rich response, “Spectre d’un songe”. Pianists Sylvie Courvoisier and Cory Smythe interpret and reimagine Stravinsky’s landmark The Rite of Spring on their breathtaking new album.

If you’re curious how two celebrated jazz pianists stack up against today’s classical stars when it comes to Stravinsky’s piano arrangement of his “Rite,” you’ll need three things: this fine rendition; a sterling one from 2017, by Marc-André Hamelin and Leif Ove Andsnes; and a stopwatch.

Sylvie Courvoisier and Cory Smythe are both known as composers and improvisers. Here, though, they play the score straight. Yet just because they’re following the notes on the page, it doesn’t mean they can’t also imbue Stravinsky’s phrases with a dash of late-night, jazz-club flavor.

They take things about a minute slower than Hamelin and Andsnes, and in a composition garlanded with so many contrasts and pivots, that approach is not without risk. Reveling in the ballet’s opening melodic material is perfectly defensible, as is injecting a lustily bumptious, Cecil Taylor-style ferocity in the chords that open the “Augurs of Spring” section. But such moves also risk diluting balletic momentum. So give this take credit for working some magic: Even as it luxuriates, it keeps driving. And the second half’s gradual, dramatic unfolding is a real contribution to the catalog of “Rite” on piano.

In the other work on the album, “Spectre d’un Songe,” Courvoisier gets to flex her compositional side. The half-hour piece once again finds her pianism in dialogue with that of Smythe, and you’ll hear traces of the “Rite” here and there. By turns intense and languorous, it is not just a worthy follow-up to their Stravinsky interpretation, but also a key entry in Courvoisier’s growing composer-performer discography.

- SETH COLTER WALLS, The New York Times, July 27, 2023

How We Got Here

Sylvie Courvoisier is often viewed as a Jazz pianist because her oeuvre is so fundamentally grounded in her profound skills as an improvisor. However, astute listeners realize quickly that she brings the touch and outlook of classical pianism to her work and indeed, the music of Messiaen, Bach, Ligeti and Stravinsky lie deep in her musical memory bank alongside Monk, Mengelberg, Bley and Taylor.

Sylvie spent 10 years creating and touring with the avant-flamenco dance master Israel Galván on an acclaimed work called La Curva. At one point in the piece Galván would strike a pose with arms raised overhead that reminded Sylvie of Vaslav Nijinsky, the star and choreographer of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. She began to respond as a ‘jazz’ musician might with little quotes from piece. This piqued the dancers’ interest - ‘I know this music, what is it?’. Sylvie revealed Stravinsky’s masterpiece and Galván immediately expressed a wish to do a full project dancing to this music. Courvoisier created a solo version of the first 3 movements of The Rite and they performed it together at the Opera Bastille in Paris and received a strong positive response from Le Monde. However, she was shortly informed that the Stravinsky family would allow no independent arrangements of his work - if a piano version of The Rite was to be performed it must be the master’s original version for piano duet and nothing else.

Rather than reacting with disappointment, this challenge was an exciting prospect for Courvoisier, and she realized that she would need a partner who was an accomplished classical pianist, who could help her with the proper rigor and detail of the piece. This person must also have serious improvisational skill because the plan was to group The Rite with an original work which she would create as a kind of response to it. She discussed the prospect with a close friend, saxophonist and composer Ingrid Laubrock, who immediately suggested Cory Smythe. Fortune smiled on this idea as Smythe had recently completed a run as Hilary Hahn’s accompanist, and was happy to have an additional creative opportunity to work as an improvisor. Sylvie wrote her musical response, Spectre d’un Songe, and was thrilled to find Smythe an equally strong partner in creating a new work as re-envisioning an old one.

Spectre uses primarily idiomatic impressions of The Rite but also specific reharmonization of previous Courvoisier creations in a Stravinsky-like mode of bitonality. In performing and recording these 2 works contiguously an additional subliminal conversation is created between them that manifests itself in dynamic interaction between the performers. In this way the reverberation of a classic masterwork is realized concretely in a present day creation.

- Ned Rothenberg