The Rite of Spring in the Gashouder, with Abel Selaocoe

About the Work

‘Four Spirits’ is Abel Selaocoe’s first cello concerto, and he is its soloist in more than the usual sense: he plays, sings, tells stories and leads. It was commissioned jointly by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the Seattle Symphony and the Dutch orchestra Philharmonie Zuidnederland, and was first performed, according to his record label, in 2022. It is scored for cello, voice, percussion and orchestra, and has four movements that run into one another.

Each of the four takes up something that, in Selaocoe’s account, holds life together in the South African township where he grew up. The first, ‘MaSebego’, is about the ancestors and the traditional healer’s role. The second, ‘Bana’, is about children and their play. The third, ‘Tshepo’, is about faith and prayer, and the last, ‘Simunye’, about community. The words he sings are in Southern Sotho and Zulu.

A concerto in the European tradition usually sets one player against the orchestra. Selaocoe turns that around. The cello part moves freely between written music and improvisation, the voice is treated as an instrument in its own right, and a solo percussionist is as close a partner as the orchestra, whose players are sometimes asked to sing as well. His singing draws on the overtone or throat singing of the Xhosa people, known as umngqokolo: a deep, buzzing tone with high harmonics floating above it.

The piece has not stood still. By the time Selaocoe recorded it in 2025, with the Aurora Orchestra under Nicholas Collon, it had been through many changes since the first performances, and because so much of it is improvised no two evenings are the same. In the Gashouder, where the audience is close to the players and part of it is standing, it is paired with another work about ritual and community: Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’.

What to Listen For

Listen first for the range of sounds one performer produces. Selaocoe’s voice can drop to a low growl beneath the cello line and then leap to light, fluttering high notes, and he often sings and bows at the same time, so that it can be hard to tell where the instrument stops and the voice begins.

In ‘Bana’ the cello turns playful and scampers high on the fingerboard, with sliding harmonics and skittish plucked notes. ‘Tshepo’ begins with rapid figures across the strings that recall Baroque cello writing, before percussion and voice pull the music somewhere else entirely. Throughout, the drumming gives the groove that the orchestra then picks up and colours.

The last movement is about singing together, and Selaocoe means it literally. In earlier performances he has taught the audience a phrase before starting and brought everyone in during the finale, so be ready to join in.

About the Work

The idea, as Igor Stravinsky later told it, came to him as a sudden picture: a pagan rite in which elders sit in a circle and watch a young girl dance herself to death as a sacrifice to the god of spring. He worked it out with the painter Nicholas Roerich, an expert on ancient Russia who also designed the production, and Sergei Diaghilev took it on for his Ballets Russes. The score, subtitled ‘Pictures of Pagan Russia in Two Parts’, occupied Stravinsky for about two years.

The first performance, on 29 May 1913 at the new Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, is the most famous scandal in the history of music. Pierre Monteux conducted and Vaslav Nijinsky had made the choreography. Laughter and protests began during the introduction and grew once the curtain rose, until the noise in the house was such that the dancers could hardly hear the orchestra, and Nijinsky shouted the counts to them from the wings. How much of the anger was aimed at the music and how much at the stamping, turned-in dancing is still argued over. What is certain is that the score very quickly made its way without the stage. It has been heard far more often in the concert hall than in the theatre, and Stravinsky himself went on adjusting it for decades with concert performance in mind.

More than a century later it has lost none of its force. The harmony is harsh, but the real revolution is in the rhythm: accents that fall where no one expects them, bars that change length from one to the next, and short melodic cells repeated and shuffled where an earlier composer would have developed a theme. The orchestra is very large, with quintuple woodwind and eight horns, and Stravinsky uses it like a huge percussion instrument.

What to Listen For

The piece begins with a single bassoon, alone and very high in its register, playing a tune Stravinsky took from a collection of Lithuanian folk songs. Other woodwinds join one by one until the texture teems like something growing. Then comes the passage everyone remembers, the ‘Augurs of Spring’: the strings hammer out one dense chord over and over in even notes while eight horns punch in accents at unpredictable moments.

Part One, ‘The Adoration of the Earth’, is a series of games and processions that pile up in speed and weight. Listen for the slow, heavy tread of the ‘Spring Rounds’, the entrance of the sage, a sudden hush as he kisses the earth, and the ‘Dance of the Earth’, which ends the first part by simply being cut off at full tilt.

Part Two, ‘The Sacrifice’, opens in near darkness, with quiet, shifting chords and muted trumpets. The young women dance in circles and one of them is chosen: eleven pounding beats from strings and drums mark the moment. The final ‘Sacrificial Dance’ is the hardest thing in the score to play, since almost every bar has a different length and the whole orchestra must jolt forward together. It ends with a brief upward flick in the flutes and a last, brutal chord. In the round space of the Gashouder, with the audience close to the players, the physical impact should be considerable.