- Stravinsky: Firebird Suite & Petrushka Suite · 1967
- Stravinsky: Orpheus & Apollon musagète · 1965
- Stravinsky Conducts "The Rake's Progress" · 1964
- Stravinsky: Pulcinella Suite, Scherzo fantastique, Fireworks & Scherzo à la russe · 1966
- Stravinsky Conducts Favorite Short Pieces · 1964
- Stravinsky: Firebird Suite & Petrushka Suite · 1967
- Stravinsky: The Soldier's Tale · 2006
- Stravinsky: Firebird Suite & Petrushka Suite · 1967
- Stravinsky: Firebird Suite & Petrushka Suite · 1967
- Stravinsky: Firebird Suite & Petrushka Suite · 1967
- Stravinsky: Pulcinella Suite, Scherzo fantastique, Fireworks & Scherzo à la russe · 1968
- Stravinsky Conducts Cantata, Mass, In Memoriam Dylan Thomas and Other Works · 2000
- Stravinsky: Agon & Canticum sacrum · 1959
Essential Albums
- Recorded towards the end of his 25-year reign at the helm of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Salonen here demonstrates what a superb orchestra he’d trained. Playing is crisp, rhythmically precise, but also alive to the amazing range of colours these three works demand. Mussorgsky’s ghoulish nocturnal fiesta takes on a menace in its original scoring; Bartók’s sleazy ballet oozes atmosphere; and Stravinsky’s shattering Rite has rarely been presented with such a feeling for its orchestral originality, thanks to the magnificent recording.
Artist Playlists
- Discover the savagely beautiful and stunningly unique music of a revolutionary.
- Explore some of the lesser-known corners of Stravinsky’s varied and colourful output.
- Stravinsky’s lyrical early works hint at a great genius to come.
- 2022
About Igor Stravinsky
One of the most remarkable minds ever applied to music, Stravinsky was a master of masks. His ballets Petrushka (1911) and Pulcinella (1920) and the opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex (1927) all have puppets or masked characters as protagonists. A professed anti-Romantic, he insisted that music could express nothing, yet powerful feelings often stir in the background and occasionally erupt: in elemental fury in the revolutionary The Rite of Spring (1913) or in startlingly intense longing, toward the end of the ballet The Fairy’s Kiss (1928). Stravinsky was born near St. Petersburg in 1882, and his first masterpieces, beginning with the ballet The Firebird (1910), are steeped in the melodic contours and the complex pulses of Russian folk music. The stunning rhythmic innovations of The Rite of Spring have their roots in his native soil. After he left Russia permanently in 1917, settling first in Paris and Switzerland, then in the U.S., he retained the influence of Russian folk and liturgical music. This is experienced in the choral-orchestral Symphony of Psalms (1930), and even in the intensely ironic neo-classical works he produced after World War I, from the chamber composition Octet (1923) and Concerto in E-Flat Major "Dumbarton Oaks" (1938), through to his strangely moving operatic masterpiece The Rake’s Progress (1951). He continues to be an inspiring influence for composers, not only in classical music, but also in jazz, rock and pop.
- HOMETOWN
- Orianenbaum, Russia
- BORN
- 1882
- GENRE
- Classical