Search - Stravinsky, Philharmonia, Craft :: Symphony in C / L'Histoire Du Soldat

Robert Craft's admirable series of Stravinsky recordings for Koch continues with this program of neo-classical works. The Symphony in C is a Haydnesque delight, albeit in unmistakably Stravinskyian language. It's done well here, with the elegiac second movement's chamber music-like scoring providing special pleasures, as does the solemn opening of the final movement. The oft-played Histoire du Soldat gets an incisive performance (though no match for Stravinsky's own recordings of the work) and is notable for Craft's restoration of the original score's percussion parts. The much shorter Symphonies of Wind Instruments, with its compelling sonorities and rhythmic inventiveness, mixes reminiscences of the tamer portions of Le Sacre du Printemps with Debussyian colorations, tart timbres, and a closing chorale. The fillers are all well done too, with the novelty being the arrangement for winds and percussion of the "Song of the Volga Boatmen." Stravinsky composed it after the Russian Revolution as a "hymn of the new Russia," probably meaning to ingratiate himself with the new order in Moscow. In retrospect, this song of slavery and oppression seems a prescient prediction of things to come. --Dan Davis