On the face of it, an odd compilation. Why issue one of Stravinsky’s least-known ballets in harness with two of his most popular? The answer lies partly in Persephone’s revisiting, 20 years on, of the theme of The Rite (earth and rebirth) with Homer’s Greece replacing pagan Russia in a neo-classical piece described by Elliott Carter as ‘a humanist Rite of Spring’. Rather more difficult to explain is the presence of The Firebird (the complete 1910 score plus a piano), but a performance as good as this is its own justification. And if three discs – avoiding a mid-ballet disc change – appears extravagant, RCA obligingly prices them as two.
San Francisco seems to have been a good move for Tilson Thomas. There is a degree of engagement – from MTT himself, and his singers and players – that was less apparent in his LSO Stravinsky, the results speaking almost everywhere of preparation-time gainfully used to address the musical needs beyond the notes, for example, such things as proper accentuation of Persephone’s subversive syllabic stresses. I have no idea how much post-concert ‘patching’ there was after the two live recordings (The Firebird and The Rite), but the playing is superbly ‘finished’, with only one obvious slip remaining – the timpanist entering early in The Firebird’s final joyful paeans (track 14, 1'57''). Possibly, the ballet’s ending was better on that particular night than any of the others; certainly, Tilson Thomas’s timing and shading of the last minutes’ darkness-to-light is very nearly as spellbinding as Gergiev’s; the management of the crescendo on the final chord, even more so.
There are reminders, in the way the San Francisco orchestra moves around these scores, in a particular quality to the vibrato, in the finesse of the detailing, and in the generally lighter than average tones – obviously lighter than Gergiev’s Kirov Orchestra, and also lacking the heft of the London or ‘big-name’ American orchestras – that it was Pierre Monteux who, half a century ago, put this orchestra on the map and made it his own. Perfumes are distinctly French, with the Firebird’s ‘supplication’ as seductive as I’ve heard it, alerting us to Ibert’s borrowings from Stravinsky for his Escales as much as Stravinsky’s own borrowings from Scriabin, or how much the technique and effect of the Introduction to Part 2 of The Rite owe to Debussy. The general exuberance of the playing in The Rite might also be thought French, though the virtuoso delivery and flamboyance are recognizably American. It isn’t a Rite that investigates the score’s radicalism; rather it is one to send you home from the concert hall exhilarated by the experience.
You would be lucky to catch Persephone in the concert hall, and recently, you would have needed a bank loan to buy a disc of it, the only available recording being the composer’s own from 1966, part of Sony’s 22-disc Stravinsky Edition. And the only other recording, Kent Nagano’s with the LPO (Virgin Classics, 6/92), one of the finest things he has done for the gramophone, has been deleted. All rather baffling given the quality of a piece which shares with Oedipus Rex an inspired blend of distancing and direct appeal, and with Apollo and Orpheus, an archaic beauty and limpidity. There is no denying that 1990s technology benefits the work’s few magnificently forceful highlights, such as the chorus’s triple forte cry of ‘Printemps’ in Part 3; and the singers in this new recording rise to that challenge (and others) with choral work that is, by a small margin, the best the piece has yet received. Tilson Thomas’s tenor, like Nagano’s Anthony Rolfe Johnson, is an improvement on Stravinsky’s own in the ease with which he finds himself in the part’s often giddy heights, though not as good as Rolfe Johnson in the area of affecting phrasing, and some of his French vowels leave a little to be desired (the word ‘un’ emerges in a variety of ways). He might also have sounded more enthusiastic as the bearer of good news in Part 2 (‘Pauvres ombres desesperees’), but it could be argued that Tilson Thomas’s tempo here doesn’t ideally reflect the change of mood, the only instance, to my ears, of a questionable tempo.
Stravinsky called Persephone a ‘melodrama’, referring to the spoken title-role. And as Persephone is Spring, RCA has cast an aptly youthful-sounding – and I assume, French – actress in the part, very good at eagerness, passion and compassion, though in her final monologue, compared with Anne Fournet for Nagano, less capable of import and mission. It may be that the voice is too young for gravitas; it may equally be that, as recorded (she doesn’t sound on-stage with the musicians, and if she was, then her microphone was too close) there was no need to project in the same way, and stage projection might have helped create an element of gravitas. It is a small point, and her relative immediacy is always appealing. In all other respects, RCA’s balance (of all three works) is beyond criticism. What a wonderfully ‘open’ acoustic Davies Symphony Hall has these days. '