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Stravinsky's definitive recording of his melodrama Perséphone Bizarrely overlooked 1930s masterpiece in superb 1957 New York recording
This transfer of Stravinsky's far too rarely-heard Perséphone was suggested to me by John Phillips, who also supplied the source recording, a copy of the original Columbia Masterworks LP in near mint condition. The original recording was exceptionally well made, though one can only curse Columbia for their non-adoption of stereo at this stage in the 1950s! In carrying out the XR remastering of the recording I compared it sonically to a more recent recording of the work by Kent Nagano and the London Symphony Orchestra (as referenced in the review above). The two shared a very close average frequency response curve, though the latter did highlight a slight thinness in the voices and suggest an adjustment which brings out greater richness in the voice of the tenor, Richard Robinson. This aside, and with a reduction in the tape hiss present on the original LP, this transfer is exceptionally faithful to the original. Unlike the LP, however, there is here no requirement to split the lengthy second section into two halves in order to meet the time limitations of the vinyl long playing record. Andrew Rose
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Introductory notes from Wikipedia
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (7 June [O.S. 5 June] 1882 – 6 April 1971) was a Russian-born, naturalized French, later naturalized American composer, pianist, and conductor. He is widely acknowledged as one of the most important and influential composers of 20th century music. He was a quintessentially cosmopolitan Russian who was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the century. He became a naturalized French citizen in 1934 and a naturalized US citizen in 1945. In addition to the recognition he received for his compositions, he also achieved fame as a pianist and a conductor, often at the premieres of his works. Stravinsky's compositional career was notable for its stylistic diversity. He first achieved international fame with three ballets commissioned by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev and performed by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes (Russian Ballets): The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911/1947), and The Rite of Spring (1913). The Rite, whose premiere provoked a riot, transformed the way in which subsequent composers thought about rhythmic structure, and was largely responsible for Stravinsky's enduring reputation as a musical revolutionary, pushing the boundaries of musical design. After this first Russian phase Stravinsky turned to neoclassicism in the 1920s. The works from this period tended to make use of traditional musical forms (concerto grosso, fugue, symphony), frequently concealed a vein of intense emotion beneath a surface appearance of detachment or austerity, and often paid tribute to the music of earlier masters, for example J.S. Bach and Tchaikovsky. In the 1950s he adopted serial procedures, using the new techniques over his last twenty years. Stravinsky's compositions of this period share traits with examples of his earlier output: rhythmic energy, the construction of extended melodic ideas out of a few two- or three-note cells, and clarity of form, of instrumentation, and of utterance. He also published a number of books throughout his career, almost always with the aid of a collaborator, sometimes uncredited. In his 1936 autobiography, Chronicles of My Life, written with the help of Walter Nouvel, Stravinsky included his well-known statement that "music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all." With Alexis Roland-Manuel and Pierre Souvtchinsky he wrote his 1939–40 Harvard University Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, which were delivered in French and later collected under the title Poétique musicale in 1942 (translated in 1947 as Poetics of Music). Several interviews in which the composer spoke to Robert Craft were published as Conversations with Igor Stravinsky. They collaborated on five further volumes over the following decade.
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