Stokowski did not record a great deal of Stravinsky's music, but he left no less than eight versions of The Firebird suite, of which this 1935 account was already the third. The score's colour and vitality clearly suited him perfectly and his performance is very strongly drawn, with virtuoso playing from the Philadelphians. Apart from a bad side join in the ''Round dance of the Princesses'' the sound is remarkably good. In a neatly played account of the Pastorale there is some fuzziness in the 1934 sound, and Fireworks was recorded acoustically: in a brilliant performance it is interesting to hear how skilfully Stokowski coped with the pre-electric process.
His orchestration of the Shostakovich prelude is highly atmospheric, and here the sound is very good, as it is throughout the 1937 version of Petrushka. There are passages, for example at the end of this work, where the quality obtained by Michael Dutton seems almost like that of a modern recording, with sharp, vivid wind solos emerging from a practically silent background. It's true that in the more heavily scored passages a slightly boomy acoustic tends to blur detail a little, but in the context of such a strong, dramatic performance this doesn't matter too much. The reading is not at all balletic, since tempos are fast, and the great conductor drives the music very hard at times, to very exciting effect. Here and in The Firebird suite it is apparent that Stokowski made those small emendations to the scoring which seemingly he could seldom resist. We can surely forgive him for this little foible when he gives us such richly characterful interpretations as the ones here.'