It s terrifying I don t understand it! , Debussy is said to have whispered to Misia Sert at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on the evening of 29 May 1913, during the first performance of The Rite of Spring. It s a puzzling remark coming from the person who had sight-read the piano four-hand version of The Rite with Stravinsky a few days earlier, and it suggests that Debussy along with the majority of the audience may have been more baffled by Nijinsky s staging than by the music, especially as he would have struggled to hear a lot of it above the shouting and catcalls that disrupted much of this famous premiere. The rioting was not an entirely spontaneous affair, since Sergey Diaghilev had done his best to engineer a scandal: the most innovative impresario of the age knew that all publicity was good publicity, and that Paris loved nothing more than cultural outrage. Diaghilev had invited a large group of students to attend the evening alongside the city s cultural elite seasoned ballet subscribers who had mostly come to see Les Sylphides, Le Spectre de la rose and the Polovtsian Dances that made up the rest of the programme. From the moment the curtain rose on a group of dancers memorably described by Stravinsky as knock-kneed and long-braided Lolitas jumping up and down , the audience reacted vociferously. Stravinsky was furious that this rendered much of his music inaudible, but against the odds Pierre Monteux and his orchestra kept playing in the pit. Given the pandemonium that greeted the first night of the ballet, it s not surprising that Stravinsky came to prefer The Rite in the concert hall, where it could be heard without the distraction of Nijinsky s choreography. The Paris concert premiere on 5 April 1914 also conducted by Pierre Monteux was a huge success, and after the performance the composer was carried through the streets on the shoulders of enthusiastic members of the audience. Stravinsky composed The Rite partly at Ustilug in the Ukraine, and partly at Clarens in Switzerland overlooking Lake Geneva and the elemental landscape of the French and Swiss Alps. The opening bassoon solo suggests a kind of primeval wail. But, played at the very top of the bassoon s register, it was an uncompromisingly modern test for any player in the early twentieth century (Saint-Saëns was said to have been outraged by what he considered an abuse of the instrument). This potent mixture of ancient and modern fuels much of The Rite: an atavistic tale of ritual sacrifice, drawing some of its musical material from traditional folk tunes that are transformed in a score of astonishing daring and savagery. Its music abounds in the most complex, convulsive rhythms (above all in the closing Danse sacrale ) and extremes of dissonance, played by a very large orchestra that acts as an unquenchable source of propulsive energy. The result is a work that still has the power to disturb and to shock a century after its premiere. In 1942 Stravinsky started to sketch a work for piano and orchestra, but these plans were only realised in the outer movements of the Symphony in Three Movements. The slow movement was drawn from an abandoned project to write the film score for The Song of Bernadette. Stravinsky himself conducted the premiere, with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra (which had commissioned the work), on 24 January 1946. While rhythm in The Rite is used to evoke a kind of stone-age savagery, in the symphony the inspiration is much more contemporary: according to the composer, the first movement was prompted by a documentary film about scorched-earth tactics in China , while the idea for the third came from newsreels ... of goose-stepping soldiers . Agon, completed in 1957, is about a different kind of confrontation. The title means contest , and the choreographer Geor