COMPOSERS: Stravinsky
LABELS: Decca
WORKS: The Rite of Spring; Les noces
PERFORMER: Galina Bojko (soprano), Margarita Maruna (mezzo-soprano), Ludovit Ludha (tenor), Egils Silins (bass); Ernst Senff Chamber Choir, members of Piano Circus, Deutsches SO, Berlin/Vladimir Ashkenazy
CATALOGUE NO: 444 542-2 DDD
Two spectacular new recordings of The Rite of Spring – indeed, I don’t remember ever having heard some of the details of its scoring with quite such clarity: the delicate sound of the antique cymbals easily discernible amid the huge tutti of the ‘Dance of the Adolescents’ on the Ashkenazy disc, for instance; or the scraping sound of the güiro lending its touch of exoticism to the ‘Procession of the Sage’ on the Järvi. Both performances are remarkably fine, too, though I found Ashkenazy rather slow in the ‘Glorification of the Victim’, and Järvi a touch fast in the ‘Ritual Action of the Ancestors’; and Järvi’s accelerando during the famous eleven hammer blows that precede the ‘Glorification of the Chosen One’ is a misjudgement.
The Ashkenazy disc appropriately couples The Rite of Spring with Stravinsky’s other ritualistic Diaghilev ballet score, Les noces, again admirably performed; while Järvi enterprisingly opts for late Stravinsky. It is good to have a new recording of the austere and seldom performed Canticum sacrum, together with its Venetian companion-piece, the Chorale Variations. The Requiem Canticles is a hauntingly beautiful score, and one whose concluding bell sounds seem to stretch back over more than four decades, to the final page of Les noces. Misha Donat