Already there is a consistency about the sound of Haitink's 'new-look' Stravinsky ballets. As with the recent Petrushka (10/91), we are partakers rather than observers in Kastchei's enchanted kingdom. The immediacy of it all is unequivocal: we pull focus on the whirring, fluttering textures of the Firebird's dance, shrill woodwind voices (not least that of the spiky E flat clarinet) leap from the ''Infernal Dance'', the febrile tremolandos of eternal night just prior to the coda (a famously intense moment in the Rattle/EMI recording) are almost tangible. And certainly there are advantages in this kind of aural scrutiny—the Berlin Philharmonic can bear it, playing here with effortless beauty, solo after seductive solo. But unlike Petrushka whose real magic lies in its intimacy and where even the Shrovetide Fair presents a kind of hustling, bustling claustrophobia, Firebird is for me about rarefied atmospheres and far-reaching spatial effects—all of them skilfully written into the sound of the score. Where trumpets break the dawn and the 'magic carillon' summons Kastchei's monsters, Stravinsky sets up a marvellously exotic tapestry of sound with trumpet exchanges from near and far and the most fantastical panoply of bells. Yet Haitink's sound team offers little or no sense of perspective, no appreciable separation in the trumpet calls (Rattle's are antiphonal); one is simply too close to the whole amazing mechanism. Certainly it is vivid, tonally satisfying; but for me the imaging badly needs to open up.
Haitink, as I say, could hardly have coaxed a more beguiling performance from his orchestra—not that the Berlin Philharmonic need much coaxing in music as grateful and as showy as this: the texturing throughout is dreamily soft, gossamer-light; every solo line is naturally curvacious, the Firebird's supplications are at once affecting and sensuous. But Rattle, with EMI's wide-angle, hugely atmospheric sound picture, offers a broader range of expression. The creepy, crepuscular opening is the more mysterious for being less 'enclosed'; Rattle is generally more acutely aware of Stravinsky's dynamic extremes pulling off some startlingly dramatic coups de theatre through their own use alone. The forces of darkness are given to sudden apparitions; Rattle, more than Haitink, makes capital of them. And compare them both in the general rejoicing of the close: Haitink, bright and breezy (with memorably fat pedal notes from the trombones); Rattle, the fairy-tale visionary: how thrillingly he hits the climactic brass chord in the final cadence of all. Details like that make this one of his most durable discs. And where Haitink adds a suitably jaunty Scherzo a la russe in its orchestral version (lovely ripe horn detailing here), Rattle goes one better offering the Whiteman-inspired jazzband version as well—far preferable with its incongruous saxes and guitar. Four Etudes is a further Rattle bonus. Definitely no contest.'