It’s only 10 and a half minutes long, but Stravinsky’s Funeral Song shares top billing on this new Decca disc and is arguably its raison d’être. The work was composed in 1909 for a memorial concert for his erstwhile teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov, who had died the previous year. The score was lost soon after its single performance. The composer, in his 1960 autobiography Memories and Commentaries, wrote: ‘I remember the piece as the best of my works before the Firebird, and the most advanced in chromatic harmony … I wish someone in Leningrad would look for the parts, for I would be curious myself to see what I was composing.’

Stephen Walsh’s booklet note recounts the rediscovery of the work, individual parts turning up in the St Petersburg Conservatory in 2015. The first modern performance was given in 2016, by Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra, after which orchestras have scrambled to present the work. This account by Riccardo Chailly and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, taken from a concert last August, is its first recording.

There are signposts towards The Firebird, Stravinsky’s next orchestral score: double basses judder and slither as if we’d snuck into Kashchei’s magical garden; chromatic lines twist and snake; a solo horn is reminiscent of Ivan’s appearance. The work, noble and solemn, is a slow procession, solo instruments in turn ‘filing past the tomb of the master’, in the composer’s words. Chailly draws out the colours vividly with his Lucerne orchestra, silky strings and rounded woodwind voices to the fore. The Funeral Song is more than a curiosity.

The rest of the disc attempts to set the rediscovery into context but is awkwardly executed. The three works preceding Funeral Song – The Faun and the Shepherdess, Scherzo fantastique and Fireworks – are programmed after it, spoiling what could have been a useful chronological sequence. And then, given the obvious links to Firebird – Stravinsky even quoted a folk tune in the ‘Khorovod’ that Rimsky had employed in his Sinfonietta – Chailly offers The Rite of Spring instead. It’s a very good performance, slightly more expansive than his Cleveland Orchestra recording, but it lacks the intense savagery of Teodor Currentzis and MusicAeterna, my current top recommendation. Chailly elicits a rhythmic grip on ‘The Augurs of Spring’ and keeps the ‘Spring Rounds’ flowing nicely, driving the finale to its exhausted collapse.