The Guildhall String Ensemble has 11 players: six violins, two each of violas and cellos and a double-bass. How would they manage, I asked myself, such passages as those in Apollo's second Variation where the cellos play in three parts? Very adroitly is the answer, and elsewhere it is a pleasure to hear some of Stravinsky's lines played with the suppleness that solo players can bring to them. Not much can be made, of course, of the score's subtler contrast between solo and tutti, but I was surprised at how much better than some bigger ensembles (better, for example, than the SCO under Saraste) these players manage the steep dynamic contrast in the ballet's last movement. Their overall sound is pleasantly grainy, with a nice ardour in the more lyrical pages and no lack of weight (they are markedly aided here by a big and reverberant acoustic); their lack of numbers shows only in the fullest passages, which have a pale, almost chalky quality to them.
The combination of bassy weight and a pallid surface is more disconcerting in the bonier Concerto in D, which has admirable crispness and attack and a good sense of line, but a glumly looming bass presence throughout. Their couplings are interesting (if not over-generous), the Double Canon gaining gravity from being played by 11 players instead of four, the Three Pieces very slightly diminished by it: the pungent oddity of this music lies, at least partly, in the very fact that it is written for, in some senses against, the string quartet (of all media).
I have no idea how much larger a string force Saraste used for his recording of Apollon, but the warmth of the SCO's sound seems more natural, less amplified by the acoustic. And Saraste's is a meatier way with the piece, anyway, the accents just a touch heavy at times, but with a wider and more satisfying gradation of string texture than Salter's group can manage. The same applies in the Concerto, of course, which allows Saraste to demonstrate how wholly different in conception Stravinsky's use of the string orchestra is in this later and drier piece. Something goes a little awry in Dumbarton Oaks, where the articulation in the first movement isn't quite as crisp as it might be (and a tape-edit sticks out like a sore thumb in the Allegretto), but matters soon improve and I wouldn't let that flaw put you off the collection as a whole if it appeals to you. That edit and a faint hum aside, it is nicely recorded.
I have to say, mark you, that Simon Rattle's Apollon on EMI (coupled with a stunning Rite of Spring) is more graciously dance-rooted than either of the newcomers, and that Christopher Hogwood's Dumbarton Oaks on Decca is as pungent as and more dapper than Saraste's (and Hogwood's Pulcinella, to which it is a fill-up, is irresistible).'