Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring, Scriabin: Poem of Ecstasy

Copy at Case Memorial Library
David Schiff wrote in the Nation: "Gergiev pricks up your ears with the first note: the famous opening bassoon solo, played molto espressivo, becomes a human voice, not an instrumental effect. Gergiev represents the cutting edge for the post-Soviet reclamation of Stravinsky's music by Russian performers. Russians have always heard all of Stravinsky's work as Russian music. Whereas some critics thought Stravinsky's 1924 Piano Concerto was reaching back to Bach, Prokofiev detected quotes from Tchaikovsky. Significantly, Gergiev's recording pairs The Rite of Spring with Scriabin's symphony Poem of Ecstasy, reminding us of their common roots in theosophical mysticism. (Stravinsky expunged the many traces of Scriabin when he reduced the score of Firebird to an orchestral suite. 'I could never love a bar of his bombastic music,' he wrote.) Russians hear Stravinsky's neoclassicism as a move from St. Petersburg to Moscow, a turn away from Rimsky-Korsakov to the Tchaikovsky of the Rococo Variations and the Serenade for Strings; for them the music remains both Russian and romantic" (3/17/08).