Stravinsky
Late Works
Cappella Amsterdam; Noord Nederlands Orkest/Daniel Reuss
Pentatone PTC5187489 72:42 mins
‘He always was and still is ahead of everybody.’
The words of Stravinsky’s musical assistant and colleague, Robert Craft, were written down the day before the master composer died in 1971, aged 88. And they pin down the quality that makes Stravinsky’s late works so remarkable.
These could not be as they are without the examples of Webern’s and Schoenberg’s music, and of the contemporary avant-garde generation headed by Pierre Boulez. Yet Threni and Requiem Canticles, the two major statements here, combine their formidable spareness and concentration with a forward-looking mindset that feels more ‘modern’ than almost anything of their time – and this from the late-Romantic creator of The Firebird, composed half a century earlier.
This recording must contain some of the finest ever interpretations of these works: the choral singing, especially, is exceptional in its clarity and super-precise tuning. Daniel Reuss’s conducting brilliantly connects with the music’s essence, its ultra-Russian, bell-like vividness, as in the grander passages of Threni.
The orchestral playing, too, is top-flight: the ‘Exaudi’ movement of Requiem Canticles here comes across as perhaps the most purely beautiful music that even Stravinsky ever wrote. And among a superlative sextet of soloists, tenor Guy Cutting excels in the central setting of In Memoriam Dylan Thomas – ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ – along with the four solo string players.
The arrangements of Hugo Wolf’s Two Sacred Songs were the last, death-haunted music Stravinsky completed; the lovely singing and artistry of mezzo-soprano Marianne Beate Kielland here makes the experience of hearing them achingly moving.
