I got an announcement in my email yesterday (Friday) that the Deutsche Grammophon and Decca labels will band together in celebration of the 100th anniversary of “The Rite of Spring” (or, as it is invariably known in the higher intellectual circles here in O.C., Le sacre du printemps) to release a 20-CD box set “including every version in their respective catalogs” of the epic work. The recordings date from 1946-2010.
There’s no word on the number of “Rites” that’ll amount to, but they could easily fit 40 on 20 CDs. It’s supposed to be released before the end of 2012.
I also can’t name all of the recordings that will be included in the set, not being that complete of a “Rite” nerd, but surely we’ll get performances conducted by Ansermet, Monteux, Dorati, Karajan, Ozawa, Markevitch(?), Solti, Maazel, Dutoit, Boulez, Bernstein … who else? I don’t think we’ll get Muti (whose fantastic recording is on EMI) or Stravinsky (who recorded with CBS).
I have to admit I think the set is a bit much. There are limits to comparing interpretations, I believe. Nevertheless, I want it.
classical life 
sacre bleu!
When are we going to celebrate Debussy’s inexhaustible and supremely beautiful “Prelude to The Afternoon of a Faun”?
Le Sacre is getting tiresome. It strikes me as a thoroughly obnoxious, hammy, clunky racket that maintains its prominence really as an egregious period piece. There is little of beauty, mystery, nobility, spirituality or elegance within it.
Uh, really? To each his own.
There is no doubt that L’après-midi is a sublimely beautiful piece that is historically significant for the development of classical music because it made an important – and rather sharp – turn away from “high romanticism” (represented by Wagner and other mid-nineteenth-century greats), and dived head first right into what can be called, for want of a better term, “impressionism” in music.
However, Le sacre occupies an even higher plateau of greatness in terms of its unique musical qualities and its pivotal place in classical music’s history. There is nothing quite like it, either before or after. Even Stravinsky himself, recognizing that he reached the very summit of the musical mountain in the piece, never continued in a similar vein, but switched to entirely different musical styles such as, for example, neoclassicism and later possibly even further away from the modernistic expressionism of Le sacre. While it is true that the piece does not have much of traditional “elegance” in it, there is plenty of other valuable stuff in that score, such as raw power, transcendent beauty, pure violence, true mystery, and yes – even such elusive quality as spirituality, perhaps as much of it as in life, that is for anyone who has the ability to actually find and feel spirituality in human life. Musically speaking, the piece is endlessly fascinating thanks mostly to its highly innovative language. For one thing, rhythm had never been as powerful a component in music until Stravinsky composed this masterpiece one hundred years ago. There was nothing even close to the rhythmical complexity and excitement of Le sacre before it was written, and arguably it has never been exceeded since. It is as if Stravinsky created a new musical language specifically for this piece alone and then said everything that this language was capable of in it – thus completing an entire important chapter of musical history in just that one piece.
For me, Le sacre is the greatest musical achievement of the last century and indeed one of the greatest of all time. While my musical taste has been evolving gradually and many of my musical preferences changed over time, not radically but noticeably – this one conviction has remained constant and absolutely unshakeable for several decades.
I found a complete list of the recordings in this box set:
Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring
1946
Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, Eduard van Beinum
The Rite of Spring
1950
L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Ernest Ansermet
The Rite of Spring
1954
RIAS Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Ference Fricsay
The Rite of Spring
1954
Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, Antal Dorati
The Rite of Spring
1956
Orchestre des cento soli, Rudolf Albert
The Rite of Spring
1956
Paris Conservatoire Orchestra, Pierre Monteux
The Rite of Spring
1957
L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Ernest Ansermet
The Rite of Spring
1959
Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, Antal Dorati
The Rite of Spring
1963
Berliner Philharmoniker, Herbert von Karajan
The Rite of Spring
1963
London Symphony Orchestra, Colin Davis
The Rite of Spring
1969
Los Angeles Philharmonic, Zubin Mehta
The Rite of Spring
1972
Boston Symphony Orchestra, Michael Tilson Thomas
The Rite of Spring
1973
London Philharmonic Orchestra, Bernard Haitink
The Rite of Spring
1974
London Philharmonic Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf
The Rite of Spring
1974
Wiener Philharmoniker, Lorin Maazel
The Rite of Spring
1974
Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Sir Georg Solti
The Rite of Spring
1975
London Symphony Orchestra, Claudio Abbado
The Rite of Spring
1976
Concertgebouw Orchestra, Colin Davis
The Rite of Spring
1977
Berliner Philharmoniker, Herbert von Karajan
The Rite of Spring
1978
National Youth Orchestra, Simon Rattle
The Rite of Spring
1979
Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa
The Rite of Spring
1981
Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Antal Dorati
The Rite of Spring
1982
Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, Leonard Bernstein
The Rite of Spring
1984
Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal, Charles Dutoit
The Rite of Spring
1985
The Cleveland Orchestra, Riccardo Chailly
The Rite of Spring
1991
The Cleveland Orchestra, Pierre Boulez
The Rite of Spring
1991
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Sir Georg Solti
The Rite of Spring
1992
The MET Orchestra, James Levine
The Rite of Spring
1994
Deutsches Sinfonie-Orchester, Berlin, Vladimir Ashkenazy
The Rite of Spring
1995
Orchestre de Paris, Semyon Bychkov
The Rite of Spring
1995
Berliner Philharmoniker, Bernard Haitink
The Rite of Spring
1999
Kirov Orchestra, St Petersburg, Valery Gergiev
The Rite of Spring
2006
Los Angeles Philharmonic, Esa-Pekka Salonen
The Rite of Spring
2007
Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Myung-Whun Chung
The Rite of Spring
2010
Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, Gustavo Dudamel
The Rite of Spring
for two pianos. 1968
Bracha Eden & Alexander Tamir (piano)
The Rite of Spring
for two pianos. 1983
Güher & Süher Pekinel (piano)
The Rite of Spring
for two pianos. 1990
Vladimir Ashkenazy & Andrei Gavrilov (piano)
Violin Concerto in D
Bonus CD. 1935
Samuel Dushkin (violin)
Lamoureux Concert Orchestra, Igor Stravinsky
Some thoughts:
– Too much is never enough
– Mrs. CKDH has been kindly informed and it has been added to my Christmas wish list (please oh please oh please oh please . . . )
– Interesting to see Chailly recorded it w/ Cleveland. It was only a few years earlier that his ill-prepared attempt to record it w/ the LA Phil was so F’ed up, Giulini himself had to step in and cancel the recording (as I remember it being described by Thomas D. Saler in “Serving Genius”). I guess he finally managed to learn it.
I had forgotten it was Chailly. I also heard somewhere, I forget where, that Giulini himself may have considered conducting it himself on record. Now that’s a Rite I’d like to hear!
Yeah, it would’ve been fun to hear at least once.
CK, Giulini’s Petrushka with Chicago is excellent, and of course The Firebird was one of his specialties. I suspect his Rite would have been memorable.
I can guess that his Petrushka would be stellar, but I thought he stayed away from more “modern” works. That said, if we took it on, it would be pretty awesome. Did he ever conduct Oedipus Rex or The Rake’s Progress? That would really be something.
Actually, CK, he performed more modern music than you might think. I know he did some Webern and Hindemith in L.A. Also, he performed, believe it or not, William Schuman’s 3rd Symphony. Perhaps MarK can remember some more.
I’d listen anything the maestro would’ve wanted to conduct. I got the same way with Salonen by the time WDCH opened. If anyone, MarK especially, has stories to share about unlikely Giulini interpretations, it’d be great to hear.
BTW: Add “Symphony of Psalms” to the list of Stravinsky works I’d like to have heard CMG conduct.
My memory of the Chailly’s Rite story in LA is somewhat different from the way it is told by Ernest Fleishmann in Saler’s book but that is not so important right now. When CMG became LA Phil’s Music Director, he was 62. From that point on, i can’t possibly imagine him conducting Le Sacre. Yes, he did a couple of Webern’s pieces and a few other fairly conservative mid-century works, as well as a really fine and memorable Mathis der Maler. However, purely from a rhythmical complexity standpoint, all these are much simpler than the Rite which i think is the reason why at that stage of CMG’s life this particular masterpiece was beyond his conducting ability, technically speaking. He was wise enough to recognize his limitations and never attempted anything that he was not sure about. He did not even do Petrushka anymore, although he was still wonderful in Firebird, but that piece’s musical language is probably closer to Rimsky-Korsakov than it is to Le Sacre. It is possible that he could conduct the latter when he was much younger but i don’t have any information about that.