RAVEL: Daphnis et Chloe Suite No. 2; STRAVINSKY: Le Sacre du Printemps; HONEGGER: Symphony No. 5 “Di Tre Re” – RIAS Symphonie-Orchestra and RIAS Chamber Choir/Igor Markevitch – Audite

by | Nov 29, 2009 | Classical Reissue Reviews | 0 comments

RAVEL: Daphnis et Chloe Suite No. 2; STRAVINSKY: Le Sacre du Printemps; HONEGGER: Symphony No. 5 “Di Tre Re” – RIAS Symphonie-Orchestra and RIAS Chamber Choir/Igor Markevitch

Audite 95.605, 73:15 [Distr. by Albany] ****:

These 1952 inscriptions from RIAS feature the extraordinary efforts of Franco-Russian conductor Igor Markevitch (1912-1983) in music with which he excelled. He employs a chorus to fill out the erotic ambiance for Ravel’s shimmering Daphnis et Chloe Suite No. 2  (18 September 1952) and its depiction of a sunrise, according to the Greek poet Longus from the 2nd Century AD.  The Pantomime section offers splendid work from the RIAS flute and winds, almost a competition piece in balletic riffs. The last episode, the Danse generale, had to be repeated at the actual concert, and we plainly hear why. The rhythmic agility and tonal acuity of the various orchestral choirs and chorus achieves a sonic luster, vibrant in every bar. More than once the whirling dervishes of sound hint at Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances. We recall that Markevitch worked for Diaghilev at the ripe age of seventeen, even having composed a piano concerto for the occasion of his appearance with the Ballets Russes in London. 

Markevitch recorded Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring first in 1951 for EMI; then again in 1959 in stereo. Markevitch first encountered the score at age ten: he studied its complications with Nadia Boulanger, claiming that for a boy it “was easy to understand” and only later does it become “hard for adults.” With what one Berlin critic called “intoxicating precision,” Markevitch presents (6 March 1952) a wiry athletically muscular Le Sacre du Printemps whose inner pulsations and eccentric gravities never lose their plastic, jarring content. The Jeu du rapt sequence, with its explosive horn parts and triple-tonguing, sets no obstacles for Markevitch, who soars through it with slashing energy. The feral bite of the last chords of the Danse de terre should renew some old shudders in this now-familiar score. The Glorification of the Elected One elicits just as much flamboyantly primitive momentum, a carnal romp. The last sequence, the Danse sacrale pulverizes our sensibilities, wild, exorbitant, outrageously visceral.

For his debut with the RIAS Symphony Orchestra, Markevitch decided to feature the Fifth Symphony, “The Three Ds,” by Arthur Honegger, commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation and given its world premier by Munch in Boston. The tympani and double-bass intone the soft, three Ds that inform every movement. The Grave first movement casts a processional shadow, rather chorale-oriented. Thin, nasal in tone, the music carries an austerity indicative of Honegger’s notion of music as “geometry in time.” The texture becomes more diaphanous near the end of the Grave. The extended second movement forms a Rondo, an Allegretto with two Adagio insertions.  The interplay of the choirs might owe a debt to Bartok’s “pairs” from the Concerto for Orchestra. The last movement, Allegro marcato, resorts to the martial ethos that opened the work, albeit resigned, the motifs occasionally redolent with the Brahms E Minor Symphony.

–Gary Lemco

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