At this year’s Proms concerts in London François-Xavier
Roth gave us a performance of Stravinsky’s ground-breaking ballet
The rite of spring on original instruments of the early twentieth
century. In the event the performance did not yield as many insights
as one might possibly have expected, since many of the period instruments
sounded not very different from their modern counterparts. Also Roth
failed to persuade his horn players to raise their bells directly into
the sky during the passage marked
pavillons en l’air as
Stravinsky would have expected. The player were presumably naturally
reluctant to jeopardise their tuning on the more treacherous period
instruments. Without the visual element, one cannot tell whether Stravinsky
in this first recording of the score made a mere sixteen years after
the riotous première
did get his horns to put their reputations
on the line during this passage, but it certainly sounds like it here.
These performances have been available before, including modern CD transfers,
and have usually garnered critical complaints because of the fallible
orchestral playing. Stravinsky’s sometimes uncertain conducting
did not help; the original release on 78s followed hard on the heels
of the first complete recording of the work by the conductor of the
première Pierre Monteux. Then we must factor in the execrable
quality of the recorded sound itself. Mark Obert-Thorn’s re-mastering
for this Pristine release cannot do much about the first two problems,
but he does manage to get quite listenable sound out of the scratchy
78s even if there is still quite a considerable layer of surface noise;
and the dynamic range is surprisingly wide. In his 1946 New York live
recording which I
reviewed
last year (also re-mastered by Mark Obert-Thorn) Stravinsky took about
a minute less over his traversal, so his interpretation clearly changed
little over the years. He maintained the same driving quality through
to his final 1960 stereo version. These later recordings will inevitably
be the points of reference for those wishing to hear the composer’s
own interpretation of his best-known score.
In his notes for the Naxos reissue of the 1946 recording, Mark Obert-Thorn
remarked on the “ragged-sounding” orchestra in this 1926
studio reading. Actually they are not too awful, even if they are clearly
not comfortable in the more strenuous passages. They and Stravinsky
make rather a muddle of the faster sections such as the
Ritual of
Abduction (track 3). There are also some slightly uncomfortable
hiatuses at the side joins between the original 78 sides, as at the
end of this track. Some of the string tuning in the following
Spring
Rounds is decidedly on the queasy side (at around 1.00). Obert-Thorn
can clearly do nothing about this, any more than he can about the often
fallible internal balances where the closely observed celesta and flutes
sound louder than the brass. There is an obvious orchestral fluff at
3.24 in track 13 where during the final
Sacrificial Dance a single
trumpet clearly wishes to go straight on while Stravinsky makes a pause.
For his recording of the
Firebird Suite Stravinsky does not follow
the original selection of pieces which nowadays normally constitute
the suite. He adds the
Supplication of the Firebird and the
Game
of the princesses with the golden apples, anticipating his procedure
in his 1945 revision of the suite, although he generally adheres to
the original 1911 instrumentation with some amendments dating from 1919.
The orchestral playing here, in more conventionally romantic music,
is considerably more secure than in the
Rite. Stravinsky and
the recording engineers thoroughly enjoy themselves, bringing out the
string harmonics
glissandi in the
Introduction (track
14, 1.38) as well as the
ponticello effects later on (3.32).
So far as I am aware this is the only recording of the composer conducting
any of the
Firebird in its original version; the later recordings
all employ the 1945 re-orchestration. As such it has a definite value.
The orchestral balances, with again unnaturally prominent celesta, are
far from natural but the results are nevertheless convincing. The performance
of the
Infernal dance is spoilt by some split horn notes - as
at track 20, 0.10 and at a number of points thereafter - and some splashy
playing elsewhere, but it has plenty of excitement and the string
pizzicati
at 2.38 are nicely and snappily together. It is unfortunate that the
Lullaby of the Firebird (track 21) comes to a full close, clearly
at the end of a 78 side, and the following eerie transformation familiar
from the usual suite is omitted with the final apotheosis shorn of its
introduction. The use of the original orchestration in the finale is
a vast improvement on the percussive neo-classical revision which Stravinsky
used in his later recordings, although the composer’s
staccato
attack lacks the ideal sense of grandeur and the detached orchestral
chords are not always quite together.
While Stravinsky’s later stereo recordings will remain the touchstone
for those who wish to hear the composer in two of his most celebrated
scores, these earliest of his performances on disc nevertheless have
value. They convey all the excitement of discovery which so often features
in recordings of relatively new music by instrumentalists some of whom
may have played in the very first performances. In this new transfer
they enable us to hear the originals in vastly improved sound, as well
as giving us Stravinsky conducting the original and superior scoring
of
The Firebird.
Paul Corfield Godfrey
Masterwork Index:
The
Rite of Spring ~~
The
Firebird
