In keeping with the season...I first heard Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du Printemps) when my father brought home a box set of classical music for his college-credit night class. The early stuff I'd heard before, but the last LP or two -- Menotti's "The Medium" (sp-p-p-ooky!), Debussy, Copland -- and the first part of The Rite. Yikes! I can understand why Disney wanted this piece in "Fantasia" -- it is soundtrack writ large. So I imprinted the Pierre Boulez version -- dry, surgically precise (Stravinsky is not given to sweeping dramatically grand gestures). It was THE version. Now, you have to understand that this music caused quite the uproar when first presented -- Igor Stravinsky, classical music's Johnny Rotten. Much later I heard Gergiev's version: loud, boorish, the horns blat and the strings smear -- what IS this noise? Then I realized -- I've grown too comfortable with this music, and Gergiew rudely presents it as it must have sounded to that first audience. I still listen to the Boulez version, but Gergiev's is refreshing . (And watch the "Russian Ark" DVD for Gergiev's appearance as the conductor in the penultimate scene.)
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