Le baiser de la fee is based on Andersen's tale The Ice Maiden, and the problem with Stravinsky's homage to the muse of Tchaikovsky is that it can indeed sound chilly, as though he had exhumed his great predecessor's remains and frosted them with his own neo-classical manner at its most chaste. It does not seem so in this performance, which demonstrates very clearly the depth at which the two composers' personalities merged, and makes it possible to see that Stravinsky's neo-classicism was at least as much 'back to St Petersburg' as it was 'back to the eighteenth century'. It is a quite different case to that of Pulcinella, in which he swallowed and digested Pergolesi whole; the later ballet is a homage of genuine love and respect, an acknowledgement of how much of the older composer Stravinsky retained. It sounds at times, in fact, like a collaboration, some of the most obviously Stravinskian passages being those most firmly rooted in Tchaikovsky, some of the most Tchaikovskian (like the charming coda to the pas de deux in Scene 3) being pure Stravinsky—Tchaikovsky 'forged' by Stravinsky, indeed. And the beautiful horn solo in the epilogue (in fact by Stravinsky) is related equally to the slow movement of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony, to the Largo in Stravinsky's Piano Concerto and to the final scene of his Orpheus. Jarvi's reading makes one continually aware that this score, in the chemical sense, is not a mixture but a compound; there is never any feeling (to lurch from one metaphor to another) that Stravinsky's moustache had been pasted on to Tchaikovsky's portrait: the bright woodwind and exhilaratingly punchy brass, the graceful delicacy of the many passages of almost chamber-music scoring derive from both composers inextricably—the listener is defied to spot the join.
Stravinsky's re-scoring of the ''Bluebird'' pas de deux (made for economy reasons during the last war) makes an appropriate filler. The woodwind solos compensate for the thin-ness of the texture a shade forcefully, perhaps, but here the sound (with its prominent piano part) is Tchaikovsky filtered through Stravinsky, so the sharp brightness may be thought to be idiomatic. It is good to see the SNO's fine tradition of Stravinsky performance being continued under their new conductor. The recording is first class.'