Search - Igor Stravinsky, Simon Rattle, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra :: Stravinsky Edition (4 CDs)

Rattle's complete Stravinsky before he went to Berlin

Santa Fe Listener | Santa Fe, NM USA | 05/31/2009

(4 out of 5 stars)

"On the used market this 4-CD set is so cheap that it's self-recommending. From an early age Rattle made his mark in Stravinsky, pushing the young, inexperienced Birmingham orchestra to match his vision. At the time England was bereft of major conductors devoted to Stravinsky; it had been decades since Colin Davis peered beyond the three most famous ballets, Petrushka, Firebird, and Le Sacre. Rattle went much deeper, and by the time he turned forty, he had recorded as much Stravinsky as Bernstein or Solti and considerabyy more than Karajan.



How do these performances hold up today The best are the glittering incidental works like Scherzo a la Russe (Rattle even unearths thee original dance-band arrangement) and the complete Firebird, which makes up in vibrancy and imagination what it lacks in virtuosity. The worst is a wan, underinflected Apollo that's too refined (or British?) for its own good. I wouldn't go out of my way to buy this Rite of Spring or Petrushka over half a dozen others, but at this price, they are freebies. Aside from Birmingham, the Northern Sinfonia appears in Pulcinella -- done rather tamely but with goodish singers -- and the noted clarinetist Michael Collins and the London Sinfonietta do the Ebony Concerto, a nice, moody reading that turns edgy in the third movement. An excellent Symphonies of Wind Instruments has been thrown in from Berlin, the style more elegant than I've heard before. Finally, we get seven scintillating minutes of 'Agon' rather than the complete ballet. Who knows why? Would the whole thing scare the children?



Note: There is a bit more of Rattle's Stravinsky off EMI, in particular a Symphonies of Winds with the Nash Ensemble (good but not an eye-opener) and a Rite of Spring with Great Britain's National Youth Orch. I haven't heard the latter, but since this annual gathering of talented kids features four to six winds to a part, it could be a hoot."