‘Icare’

Extract

The facts. L'Envoi d'Icare (The Flight of Icarus) was written in the summer of 1932 for a projected ballet by Serge Lifar which was never staged. Its first concert performance, on 26 June 1933, caused a sensation—‘Cette musique, pure comme le diamant, represent une aspiration à la vie éternelle d'une puissance inouïe’ wrote Henri Prunières in La Revue musicale—and over the next few years many musicians and even some critics praised it highly. ‘Il y a dans la musique de Markevitch, cette force claire, (non pas froide), concentrée, que I'on trouve chez les mystiques, cette poésie qui vient de son caractére statique et de sa perfection’, observed Joseph Weterings in La Revue musicale after Scherchen had conducted the last two sections in Brussels in April 1935.