I could write at length on the historic nature of Stravinsky’s return to the land of his birth but the booklet is unusually detailed and we haven’t much space. The notes hail this recording of Petrushka as “among the most interesting”. Well, it is certainly among the shortest: a mere torso which starts shortly before the “Russian Dance” and omits the opening “Shrovetide Fair”. The third tableau is cut altogether and the abrupt concert ending is grafted on some minutes before the end of the fourth tableau. Toscanini (RCA, 11/92) and Fricsay (DG, 11/94 and otherwise complete) also use this ending. Stravinsky’s orchestra is the Moscow Philharmonic and all their hallmarks are here: strident, vibrato-laden brass (with occasionally unreliable intonation) plus astoundingly fierce string articulation (try the opening of track 8, “Dance of the Coachmen”). What lends the performance real force, quite apart from its political and cultural context, is the astonishingly hectic pace and the sensation that the musicians are playing at or beyond their capabilities. Disaster is courted but somehow averted (only just in the 5/8 section of track 9 around the one-minute mark). The same applies to Fireworks which makes even Dorati (Mercury, 11/91) sound tame by comparison.
The remaining works feature the USSR Symphony, not yet the first-rate ensemble it became under Svetlanov. The players make heavy weather of Orpheus and the elegance usually associated with Stravinsky’s neo-classical vein is almost wholly absent. No doubt the reedy-sounding oboe discourse of the “Air de danse” has a fascination of its own. The apparently inattentive and bronchial audience again makes its presence felt in the Ode, though this seems a happier affair notwithstanding the precarious moments. The Song of the Volga Boatmen is delivered in Stravinsky’s minatory arrangement. Not all that well-known even today, it is said to have perplexed the Soviet audience. Its dense Mussorgskian gloom hardly conforms to the tenets of socialist realism.
The 1962 sound is inevitably harsh and forward throughout, like most Melodiya-sourced productions of the period, but fortunately the NoNoise remastering doesn’t seem to have ironed out what dynamic contrasts remain. Applause can be somewhat abruptly faded. As the record of a unique event, complete with a very brief speech from “the shameless prophet of bourgeois modernism”, this is a disc no Stravinsky aficionado will want to be without. Its appearance coincides with Richard Taruskin’s attempt to relocate the composer in the Russian tradition and is all the more timely for that.'