Stravinsky Conductor

A new album from the Gramophone Award-winning team of Steven Osborne, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Ilan Volkov. Here they present Stravinsky’s complete music for piano and orchestra as a rare complete set, plus the Concerto in D for string orchestra. The taut rhythmic brilliance of this music is perfectly suited to the particular artistry of these performers. Volkov’s mastery of Stravinsky’s neo-classical idiom is clear from the ecstatic critical response to his recordings of many of the composer’s orchestral works.

For her previous CD on the ORFEO label, Baiba Skride recorded two highly Romantic violin works by Brahms and has now turned her attention to two 20th-century violin concertos whose composers struck out in extremely individual directions while drawing on traditional formal models.

Sir Simon Rattle and the Berliner Philharmoniker, whose Grammy® award-winning accounts of Stravinsky’s Symphony in C and Symphony of Psalms are among Gramophone magazine’s Top 10 Stravinsky Recordings (2011), return to the composer with a recording of the ground-breaking ballet Le Sacre du printemps, whose premiere a century ago marked a turning point in 20th century music history. The programme on this release also includes new recordings of Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments and Apollon Musagète, another of the Russian master’s breathtaking ballets.

Igor Stravinsky was one of music's truly epochal innovators; no other composer of the twentieth century exerted such a pervasive influence or dominated his art in the way that Stravinsky did during his seven-decade musical career. Aside from purely technical considerations such as rhythm and harmony, the most important hallmark of Stravinsky's style is, indeed, its changing face.

This Collector's Edition CD should be an essential item for classical music lovers. I also think that it's most important for people to know that Benny Goodman was recognized not only for his brilliant work as a jazz clarinetist,but also for classical works which were written for and dedicated to him by leading composers of the 2oth century such as Bela Bartok and Aaron Copland. This is an excellent recording that I would highly recommend.

Is there any doubt that Robert Craft is the reigning Stravinsky conductor of our time? His years of friendship with, apprenticeship to and quasi-adoption by Stravinsky certainly give him bona fides for this, but it is his impeccable musicianship that tells here. These performances have appeared before on CD Jeu de cartes and Danses concertantes on Koch, and the Scènes de Ballet, Variations, and Capriccio on MusicMasters all recorded in the 1990s. Naxos is in the process of re-releasing on their own label all of Craft's Stravinsky recordings of that period (plus a few new ones done specifically for them) and the series is an undiluted triumph.

Master and pupil? A youthful venture on the part of the composer of Scheherazade while naval officer, this symphony of Rimsky-Korsakov deploys fine rhetoric worthy of Haydn’s ‘military’ model incorporating contemporary material. His ‘cadet’ applies himself studiously - Stravinsky’s approach is more casual although the da capo appear in their entirety. A mere ad libitum experiment, his Scherzo fantastique is disappointingly lacking in metronomic rigour but not in inventivity. These two pieces appear together for the first time in over a century and are showcased with consummate skill.

2CD anthology of two albums previously released by EMI, with Seiji Ozawa conducting the Orchestre de Paris and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. A rare, hard to find recording of historical value.