Stravinsky: Rite Of Spring Etc. / Gustavo Dudamel

Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, Gustavo Dudamel

Revueltas: La noche de los Mayas
Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring

Wholenote Discovereies - February 2011
This is an exuberant new recording of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring by Gustavo Dudamel. Although appointed Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2009, Dudamel continues to work with the outstanding young players of his homeland as these thrilling live recordings from Caracas in February 2010 attest. As always Dudamel brings the best out in the youngsters and one would not likely guess this is anything other than a fully professional orchestra just by listening. The Stravinsky is paired with La noche de los mayas (Night of the Maya) by Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas. Completed a year before the composer’s death in 1940 La noche had to wait twenty years for its first performance. Although not likely to replace Rite of Spring in the repertoire anytime soon, this is a dramatic, lyrical, colourful and powerful work that deserves to be much more widely heard. With Dudamel as its champion we can rest assured that it will be. David Olds

Gustavo Dudamel elicits high octane playing from his Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela in these two full-frontal force orchestral pieces. Both Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps and Revueltas’s La noche de los Mayas are revealed as models of revolutionary music making.
In Le Sacre du Printemps, Stravinsky transformed painter Nicholas Roerich’s fleeting vision of a pagan ritual in which a young girl dances herself to death as a sacrifice to the god of Spring into a musical simulation of barbaric primality.
La noche de los Mayas, originally scored for a 1939 film, is one of Mexico’s musical treasures. This concert suite, edited by José Ives Limantour, dating to 1961, evokes a mystical lost world.

Price: $15.98