Stravinsky: Le sacre du printemps

Simon Rattle’s years as the Berlin Philharmonic’s music director produced a stream of stellar recordings, but none more impressive than this one. The spectacular rhythmic firepower of Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) instantly made Stravinsky’s ballet score a modernist legend; the first performance, in Paris in 1913, triggered the most famous audience riot in classical music’s history. But the work also looks back to Stravinsky’s late-Romantic Russian roots, with lush instrumental coloring to contrast with the earth-stamping rhythms. Rattle and his orchestra do superlative justice to both aspects of the music, conjuring gorgeous iridescent sounds in the nature-depicting passages, while the culminating “Danse sacrale” (“Sacrificial Dance”) is delivered with ferocious firepower. Also performed here, to the same exceptional standard, are Symphonies of Wind Instruments—a smaller but masterly follow-up to Le sacre—and the poised and beautiful Apollon musagète (Apollo, Leader of the Muses) for string orchestra.