Lucerne Festival Orchestra

Riccardo Chailly, Lucerne Festival Orchestra – Richard Strauss: Also sprach Zarathustra; Tod und Verklärung; Till Eulenspiegel; Salome’s Dance (Live) (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:25:14 minutes | 1,50 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Decca Music Group Ltd.

The dream team of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra and Riccardo Chailly return with over 85 minutes of some of the greatest orchestral music ever written. Continuing the critically acclaimed Lucerne/Chailly partnership launched by the world premiere recording of Stravinsky’s Funeral Song.

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Lucerne Festival Orchestra, Riccardo Chailly – Stravinsky: Le sacre du printemps – Chant funèbre (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:10:18 minutes | 1,17 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Decca

The rediscovery of Stravinsky’s Funeral Song, from a recording made in St Petersburg in Spring 2015, was a major event. Composed over the summer of 1908 in honour of his late teacher Rimsky-Korsakov, who died in June that year, it marked a moment where Stravinsky was working at many different types of writing, looking for a personal language. The work was first performed at a memorial concert in St Petersburg in January 1909 but thereafter it disappeared without a trace: the only evidence of its existence was in accounts of the concert and the composer’s own nostalgic memories of the work he saw as “the best of my works before Firebird, and the most advanced in terms of chromatic harmonies.” And here at last is the world’s first ever recording of it! A stunning little treasure in which we can still hear Rimsky, and also the Stravinsky of Firebird, but perhaps also still the Stravinsky of the Rite of Spring, which was still very recent, a testimony to the composer’s breakneck evolution. It was in the same year, 1908, that Stravinsky interrupted his writing of Fireworks when he heard the news of Rismsky’s death in order to compose his Funeral Song; the Scherzo Fantastique was the last score by the young composer that the old master would ever get to read, although he never heard it performed. With this recording, Riccardo Chilly offers us a judicious selection of four works from the composer’s youth (we also findThe Faun and the Shepherdess of 1906, a little cycle of three melodies with orchestra, sung in French, here with Sophie Koch) followed by the big turning point that is theRite of Spring, with a reading which is both clear and fiery.

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