Stravinsky’s ground-breaking trilogy of Diaghilev-commissions plus a scandalous Bartók ballet, treated to sumptuous late-70s Decca engineering and the Vienna Philharmonic sound.
Christoph von Dohnányi has long been considered one of the most versatile conductors of our time, making a name for himself in particular with the works of Romanticism and the Second Viennese School. From early in his career he established an excellent rapport with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. Both in concert and on record he drew from them, playing of unusual transparency and clean attacks, in music from Mendelssohn to Philip Glass.
This generous Eloquence anthology of four complete Decca LPs brings together the Vienna Philharmonic’s only Stravinsky recordings for Decca and finds Dohnányi on home turf with ballets by his countryman Bartók and by Stravinsky that leap from the speakers thanks to both the conductor’s vivid characterisation and to first-class Decca analogue sound. ‘Petrushka’ and ‘The Miraculous Mandarin’ (complete with chorus) were taped in the Sofiensaal in 1977 with ‘The Firebird’ following two years later. In the same 1979 sessions, Dohnányi and the VPO also recorded the pair of Portraits which the young Bartók wrote while in love with the violinist, Stefi Geyer: the solo part here is played with luscious tone by the native-Viennese violinist, Erich Binder then leader of both the VPO and the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra.
The Diaghilev trilogy is completed with Lorin Maazel’s 1974 VPO recording of ‘The Rite of Spring’, done in the grand manner and with the conductor’s typical attention to detail and fine balancing of inner parts. (© Decca Music Group Limited / Universal Music Australia Pty Ltd.)