Stravinksy: The Ballets / Craft Edition, 6 Cds

Robert Craft (conductor); London Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra, International Piano Quartet, Tristan Fry Percussion Ensemble, St. Luke's Orchestra, Twentieth Century Classics Ensemble,

Igor Stravinsky (1882 - 1971): Oedipus rex; Les noces; Firebird; Pétrouchka; Pulcinella; Le baiser de la fée; Le sacre du printemps; Le rossignol; Apollon musagète; Agon; Orpheus; Jeu de cartes; Danses concertantes; Scènes de ballet; Variations for Orchestra "Aldous Huxley in memoriam"; Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra

Robert Craft Edition - 6 CDs
CD 1: ‘May whoever listens to this music never experience the insult to which it was subjected and of which I was the witness in the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris, Spring 1913’, wrote Stravinsky in 1968, of the première of his Rite of Spring. Written for a huge orchestra to a setting of scenes from pagan Russia, this elemental ballet with its vaulting, violent energy and assymetrical rhythms almost from beginning to end, has become a major landmark of 20th century music. Stravinsky’s orchestral palette, different and distinctive in every work, is never more exotically colourful than in his one act opera The Nightingale, which is a virtual catalogue of avian imitations.
CD 2: Stravinsky’s one-act ballet with song, Pulcinella, is no mere re-working of music by Pergolesi and other 18th-century Italian composers. Instead he uses the originals as a springboard for experimentation, transforming the music into a modern work by means of quirky instrumentation (for example, the jazzy glissandos of the double-bass solo), ostinato melodies, and other 20th-century devices. The ballet The Fairy’s Kiss, at another extreme, is a largely original composition. Stravinsky greatly altered, developed, and elaborated melodies from early piano pieces and songs by Tchaikovsky, expanding them into sizeable ballet numbers to form a continuous dance symphony.
CD 3: Oedipus Rex, based on Sophocles’ tragedy, is an established twentieth-century classic. Employing a speaker, male chorus and orchestra, it represents Stravinsky’s 1920s neo-classicism at its peak. Les Noces, an amalgam of ballet and dance cantata in four scenes for solo voices, chorus, four pianos and seventeen percussion instruments, depicts a Russian peasant wedding. One of only two theatrical works by Stravinsky to combine music with a text in his mother tongue, Les Noces is also his most Russian work, in which ritual, symbol and meaning on every level are part of his direct cultural heredity.
CD 4: Commissioned by George Balanchine, Jeu de cartes is a prime example of melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic ideas emerging helter-skelter from Stravinsky’s imagination. Unlike his other ballets, it contains no slow music and no lovers’ pas-de-deux adagio. Danses concertantes was the first large-scale piece composed entirely in what was to be Stravinsky’s Hollywood home for the next 24 years. First performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Robert Craft, Variations are the densest music Stravinsky ever wrote, yet the ingenious rhythmic structures allow every note to be heard. Ezra Pound, in a balcony at the Teatro La Fenice for a September 1934 performance of the Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra, wrote: “the piano and orchestra are as two shells of a walnut”. Alban Berg, who had shared the same concert with Stravinsky, remarked to the latter: “I wish I could write such happy music”.
CD 5: This is the first recording of the Complete Original Version of Stravinsky’s most popular work, The Firebird. Among the many differences between the present recording and its predecessors is the restoration of two long, valveless trumpets on stage, each playing a single note standing out above the entire orchestra. This is a thrilling effect in all likelihood heard for the first time since 1910 on this recording. Compared to the lush orchestra of The Firebird, the sonorities of Petrushka may seem brittle but harmonically, rhythmically, and instrumentally the work is innovative on every page, a drama of great power and originality.
CD 6: Stravinsky’s three ‘Greek’ ballets span thirty years of his creative career. Apollo, a 1947 revision of Apollon musagète (1928), is Stravinsky’s homage to the Greek concept of the unity of music, dance, painting, and poetry. It was described by Dyagilev as ‘an amazing work, extraordinarily calm and with greater clarity than anything he has done… music not of this world, but from somewhere above…’. Begun in 1953, when Stravinsky was turning towards serialism, the plotless Agon can be viewed as a contest (from the Greek agon) between traditional and modern compositional techniques. Orpheus (1948) mines a vein of lyricism hitherto absent in Stravinsky’s art and is the only score after Firebird in which the term ‘espressivo’ occurs frequently. The music is descriptive, pictorial, rich in musical symbols and in the matching of musical imagery with stage action.

Price: $77.98