Ravel: Ma mère l’Oye; Stravinsky: Le Sacre du printemps
Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy (piano) HarmoniaMundiHMM902752 49:20mins
Those of us lucky, as I was at both their Ragged Music Festival and at the East Neuk Festival, to have heard Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy play Stravinsky’s own arrangement of The Rite of Spring for four hands – with a few tweaks of their own – will find an extra layer of insight here.
By pairing it with Ravel’s original Ma mère l’Oye (Mother Goose Suite), they magically reveal not only how so much more comes through in Stravinsky’s orchestral masterpiece as pared down, but how, at the other end of the scale, musical poetry can fill out the surface simplicity of Ravel’s ‘pièces enfantines’. The Beast creeps into the sublime Gymnopédie of Beauty’s reverie like a creature from Stravinsky’s ‘Scenes of Pagan Russia’; harmony restored, the apotheosis of ‘The Fairy Garden’ is then treated with the infinite delicacy and sensitivity that we’ve come to expect from this duo.
If at the very start of The Rite of Spring the sound seems blunt and dry, don’t worry; the sustaining- pedal colours the two pianists find when necessary give us plenty of impressionism long before we usually find it in the orchestral score (at the beginning of Part Two); the ‘Spring Rounds’ section is an absolute beauty, albeit with a hair-raising climax. Tsoy (I assume) replaces offbeat quavers supporting the start of the ‘Ritual Action of the Ancestors’ with highly evocative tapping.
The two value the silences and often take their time over plunges into each next ritual, and the ‘Dance of the Earth’, which you imagine a piano simply can’t represent, crowns the performance. More, please.
