Recording captures Igor Stravinsky's unmistakable personality

Besides being a great composer, Igor Stravinsky loved to make provocative comments. While his contemporary Richard Strauss said he could portray a baby's spoon in music, Stravinsky said music is powerless to express anything but itself.

Stravinsky also admonished performers to not interpret his music, yet Stravinsky's own performances have much more personality than others', despite the composer's serious deficiencies as a conductor.

Therefore, reissues of Stravinsky's historic performances on the Andante label, which have just reached a third volume, are especially valuable and provide more than three hours of delightful listening to music that is largely neglected in the concert hall today. Stravinsky's early ballets are standard repertoire, to be sure. "The Firebird," "Petrouchka" and "The Rite of Spring" were played by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra under Mariss Jansons, for example.

But it's been nearly 20 years since Stravinsky's powerful "Symphony in Three Movements" was performed in Pittsburgh. The Andante set includes the recording the composer made with the New York Philharmonic in 1946 shortly after its premiere, when the music's World War II context was immediate rather than historical.

Other performances with the Philharmonic include the droll humor of "Circus Polka," a short ballet for elephants that plays with Franz Schubert's "Marche militaire," "Scenes de ballet," "Four Norwegian Moods" and "Ode."

Pickup ensembles assembled for recordings that include top East and West Coast performances of the late '40s and early '50s, such as those by New York Philharmonic concertmaster John Corigliano, provide excellent performances of diverse compositions including "Scherzo a la russe," the ballet "Orpheus" and other neoclassical pieces such as "Danses concertantes" and "Concerto in D." Stravinsky also conducts Woody Herman and his jazz band Herman's Herd in the Ebony Concerto, the musicians for whom the music was written.

The Andante set increases its value by including a rare performance by 27-year-old Leonard Bernstein conducting members of the Boston Symphony in two chamber works, the "Octet" and the Suite from "L'Histore du soldat." Stravinsky loved the way Bernstein conducted his music, but the American conductor did not rerecord these pieces later in his career.

The transfers of the old recordings are superbly accomplished, astonishing in the openness of the sound.

Historic Poulenc

French composer Francis Poulenc is mainly remembered for charming and witty music, but his great opera "Dialogue of the Carmelites" could be hardly be more serious in subject matter. It is set in a French nunnery during the French revolution, setting personal issues of despair, hope and escape in the context of social upheaval. The opera ends with the nuns being executed by guillotine.

EMI has properly restored its classic recording of "Dialogue of the Carmelites" -- that was supervised by the composer -- to its "Great Recordings of the Century" series. Denise Duval offers a riveting portrayal of Blanche de La Force, as part of a strong ensemble performance that includes the admirable Liliane Berton, Denise Scharley and two other superb singers early in their career -- Regine Crespin and Rita Gorr.

Pierre Dervaux is the excellent conductor of the 1958 recording made in Paris.

RCA Classic Library

Many great recordings have been cut from the catalog of available recordings in recent years, which makes RCA's new "Classic Library" extra valuable. The classic performances have been superbly remastered.

Among the highlights of the initial 20 releases is a coupling of Johannes Brahms' Violin Concerto and Concerto for Violin and Cello featuring Jascha Heifetz. When Pinchas Zukerman gave a master class at the Jewish Community Center earlier this season, his opening remarks included the comment that among violinists there is Jascha Heifetz, and then below him "all the rest of us." Heifetz is joined by cellist Gregor Piatigorsky in the Double Concerto, which features forward-moving lyricism in the "slow" movement. Moreover, conductors Fritz Reiner and Alfred Wallenstein lead exceptionally coherent orchestra collaborations.

Other valuable "Classic Library" reissues include American conductor James Levine's deeply satisfying account of Gustav Mahler's Fourth Symphony with soprano Judith Blegen and the Chicago Symphony, Renee Fleming's beautiful recording of Strauss' "Four Last Songs" and other songs with Christoph Eschenbach and the Houston Symphony, Vladimir Horowitz playing Sergei Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto with Eugene Ormandy and the New York Philharmonic, and Leontyne Price singing "Puccini Heroines."

The albums

Igor Stravinsky, Composer & Performer, Volume III