CD Review: Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra


Did Bugs Bunny ruin the Barber of Seville for you? How about Merrie Melodies’ The Three Little Pigs with Brahms’ Hungarian Dance #5? I have a particular eye/earworm of The Rite of Spring: I can never unsee the gorgeous choreography of Pina Brausch when I hear this piece. The Park Avenue Chamber Symphony’s recording is bright and clear and complements the rather dark storyline of the ballet. The First Part is a vital description of nature and leads with some urgency to the undeniable corporeality of the Second Part. The backbone of the piece, however, is Track 2, although I prefer my Augurs of Spring to be a little more heavy-handed than David Bernard’s version, such as the Cleveland Orchestra/Pierre Boulez’s take on it; I think this reflects Bernard’s interpretation, though, and does not make Stravinsky an inappropriate choice for this orchestra. (The Augurs of Spring always strikes me as a misplaced climax, though.)

The Bartók Concerto for Orchestra, known as a soloistic piece, also has a pure sound, which emanates from the musicians themselves and is perhaps also enhanced by the fine recording engineering. Again, the chamber symphony easily handles the piece’s gravitas with aplomb. Apparently, the movements’ tempi listed on the back cover differ from their historical provenance and this made me curious to hear it live under another baton: fortuitously, this will be possible when the TSO performs it on May 4, 2017 in a matinée, led by Peter Oundjian.

This CD offers two excellent examples of early 20th-century eastern-European composers who still captivate us technophiles with these elemental pieces that were based on European folk song.

This review first appeared in the October 2016 issue of The WholeNote magazine.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

But There IS Joel Kinnaman...

Image
ALT: Joel Kinnaman as Tak Kovacs in a dark, strange world, wearing a blue coat and shirt; he's looking around in wonder. Oh god, I didn't know whether I could get past the first episode: I love dystopian futures, but this seemed hackneyed...  Altered Carbon has the feel of sometimes The Hunger Games , sometimes Harry Potter , often Repo! The Genetic Opera or Gotham City or Narcopolis .There's martial arts, comic booky treatments, digital effects and story content. Some of it is dumb, and the names for things in the future are lazy: The Array is the internet, a sleeve is a host, ONIs are basically smartphones, Poe is like TNG's Data, Meths are the 1%, and paying my chip-implanted fingers is technology that's already here. The "strong, independent woman cop" is the lamest character attempt/trope out there, and the actress is terrible. The producers seem to be trying to appease audiences on every front rather than trying to make a solid, consistent produ
Read more

Lilith is Fair

Image
Just wanted to highlight Maihyet Burton's store Lilith as it has changed location since I last mentioned it. This funky clothing (et. al.) store is now in Studio 103 of the Case Goods Building of the Distillery District, 55 Mill St. And Buttoons buttons are still being carried there! She and partner Denis Taman Bradette also have a very funky thing going on with the Warmings Project , part artistic endeavour, part environmental/social activism which assumes a post apocalyptic language and visual reference for Ontario should our land be decimated by our climatic abuses. They express this creatively through their photography and imagined mythology. I'll let her blogs express it better : "The hope is to voice the urgency of climate change through the development of a body of work that interconnects art, design, sustainability, education & literature....On 150 acres of scarred, previously clearcut land in Hunta, 100km north of Timmins, they plan to develop a Refuge for th
Read more