Of four new Francophone Rites – taking into account (8/13) the recordings conducted by Paavo Järvi and Philippe Jordan – Michel Tabachnik’s live performance is the one that seems most to be about more than itself, that most makes me notice the choreography as a vital missing element to the drama of the Rite. Scrawny oboes, hollow, honking clarinets and acidulous-sounding trumpets in the Brussels Philharmonic bring more primary colour to their solos than the comparatively international blend of the other orchestras. The own-brand recording offers a reasonably realistic seat in the stalls, unlike the more or less skewed and partial perspectives from the other three. Under Daniele Gatti, The Rite is a better-fed, less feral beast, tamed by legato, more cautiously led and played (though all four recordings come within touching distance of Stravinsky’s 1947 metronome marks) and proceeding to a final chord that is actually less carefully placed in the studio than Tabachnik brings off, live, as the culmination to a ‘Danse sacrale’ of theatrically mounting tension.

Gatti’s ‘symphonic’ approach naturally pays off in a Petrushka that enjoys all the fun of the fair but the wholesome, rather thickly textured folkloristic character doesn’t escape from the dimensions of a picture postcard. Tabachnik’s coupling is a party-piece of his own, in quite a different way as befits a pupil of Pierre Boulez, a Song of the Nightingale that points up the mechanistic/naturalistic violence of both works. Rattle’s recent Berlin Rite (EMI, 6/13) may more wholly and carefully capture the idea of The Rite as perpetually strange and foreign, but no one listening to Tabachnik and his no-less-committed orchestra will come away unmoved.