Stravinsky spent over three decades in America, and the achievements of those years cannot be summarized in a single CD. This one, though, has been absorbingly programmed to chart the progress from his early years there, awkwardly coming to terms with a new language, a new and rather harsh economic climate and a musical public that welcomed him warmly enough but was at the same time welcoming scores of other refugee musicians. Acutely conscious of money and the absence of it ever since losing his home and the income from his estate after the Russian Revolution, he attempted in vain to obtain film music commissions from Hollywood (the Ode in memory of Natalie Koussevitzky is partly made up of recycled music from abortive films) and tried to write pop songs and to make money in the relatively prosperous world of jazz. But the Scherzo a la Russe, originally for jazz band (played here in its orchestral version), sounds like a rejected movement from Petrushka. Rather more shrewdly he wrote the Scenes de ballet for a Broadway revue, and was rewarded with a respectable run of performances.

The next stage, from the rather late-arriving first major masterpiece of his American years (the Symphony in Three Movements) via the last and longest of his neo-classical works (The Rake’s Progress) to his realization that he needed to find a new path, is not chronicled here, only the outcome. (The inclusion of the Concertino, however, written for string quartet long before Stravinsky’s arrival in America, arranged there for a chamber orchestra of 12 instruments, is a neat demonstration of how much of his late style was already present in his earlier work.) The proto-serial Agon and the super-serial Variations both represent Stravinsky’s relief and sheer exuberance, not so much at finding serialism as at realizing that he had been writing quasi-serially all his life and that he could exploit its techniques while still remaining himself.

So far, so dry-as-dust, perhaps. What makes this a hugely entertaining as well as an instructive survey is the infectious zest of the performances. The enjoyable racket of the Circus Polka, the gorgeous trumpet tune in Scenes de ballet (now if Stravinsky had persuaded Ira Gershwin, say, to write a lyric for that it might have made a fortune), the sheer delight in inventing entrancing new sonorities that is central to Agon, the more arcane but none the less obvious pleasure in the Aldous Huxley Variations of constructing perfect, crystalline mechanisms – all these are conveyed with exemplary but not in the least chilly precision. No less important, Tilson Thomas finds premonitions of the Symphony in Three Movements in the undervalued Ode, and a quality of quiet ceremonial in the finale which disproves the easy assumption that Stravinsky cynically palmed offcuts from his studio floor on to the bereaved Koussevitzky. And his perception of an essential lyricism in the Variations, often seen as Stravinsky’s most hermetic work, might well win new admirers for that epigrammatic masterpiece. The recordings match the lucid brilliance of the performances.'