Hirshhorn Concert: ‘Igor and Coco’


“Igor and Coco,” the catchy title of a free concert on Saturday, Feb. 1, in the Hirshhorn Museum’s Ring Auditorium, refers (no surprise) to Russian composer Igor Stravinsky and French fashion designer Coco Chanel.

The lifetimes of these two cultural revolutionaries almost perfectly overlapped. Born near Saint Petersburg in 1882, Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky died in New York City, aged 88, in 1971. Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel (how she got the nickname Coco is disputed), a year younger, was born in western France and died in Paris, three months after Stravinsky, at 87.

Led by founder Christopher Kendall, who headed the University of Maryland School of Music and the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance, the 21st Century Consort will perform two pieces from the nineteen-teens and two from the twenty-twenties.

The concert is the third of five at the Hirshhorn in 2024-25 by the 21st Century Consort, the Smithsonian’s resident contemporary music ensemble since 1978. Both the museum, which opened in 1974, and the ensemble, founded the following year as the 20th Century Consort, are in their 50th seasons.

“Igor and Coco” features a piano four-hands performance of Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring).” This landmark ballet’s primitivist score and choreography, by Vaslav Nijinsky, which riled up the Paris audience at its May 29, 1913, premiere, make it the musical counterpart of Pablo Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” Though painted in 1907, “Les Demoiselles” was first exhibited in 1916, to similarly vocal disapproval. The scandalous and barbaric — scandaleux et barbare! — 20th century had begun.

Chanel opened her first Paris boutique, selling hats she designed, in 1910. Three years later, in Deauville, she introduced a line of high-end casual clothing, adding a shop in Biarritz, another French seaside resort, in 1915. In 1920, she met Stravinsky, had a brief affair with him and underwrote that year’s new production of “Le Sacre.”

Amid various other affairs, Chanel created costumes for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes throughout the 1920s and 1930s. On Jean Cocteau’s one-act “Le train bleu” of 1924 — choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska to music by Darius Milhaud — she collaborated with sculptor Henri Laurens, who designed the set, and Picasso, whose painting of two women running on a beach was enlarged as the front cloth; all were leading figures in the Parisian avant-garde.

The other piece from this period is Lili Boulanger’s sparkling “D’un matin de printemps (Of a spring morning),” originally written in 1917 as a duet for violin and piano. Born in Paris in 1893, the younger sister of famed teacher of composers and conductors (Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, Quincy Jones, Daniel Barenboim, etc.) Nadia Boulanger, Lili Boulanger was the first woman composer to win the Prix de Rome. She died of tuberculosis in 1918, 24 years old.

Moving some 100 years forward and 5,000 miles southwest, the ensemble will perform “Ton yo han mek fashan,” written in 2020-21 by pianist and composer Mikhail Johnson. Born in Jamaica in 1989, Johnson earned a doctoral degree at Texas Tech. The title, in Patois, literally “Turn your hand, make fashion,” is a Jamaican expression meaning to make something ordinary fashionable or to make the most of a bad situation. In its use of clarinet and marimba, here standing in for rumba box (a thumb piano), the piece references mento, a predecessor of ska and reggae.

The concert will conclude with the world premiere of Scott Wheeler’s “A Woman of Her Time: Coco Chanel Sings,” conducted by the composer, an Emerson College faculty member born in Washington, D.C., in 1952. Appearing as Chanel: soprano Katherine Lerner Lee, who holds bachelor’s degrees from Oberlin in voice and (appropriately) French and a master’s degree from Bard Conservatory.

 

Igor and Coco
The 21st Century Consort
Saturday, Feb. 1
5 p.m. (pre-concert discussion at 4 p.m.)
Hirshhorn Museum
Independence Avenue and 7th Street SW
Advance registration recommended at hirshhorn.si.edu.

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