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Gustavo Dudamel elicits high octane playing from his Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela in these two full-frontal force orchestral pieces. Both Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps and Revueltas’s La noche de los Mayas are revealed as models of revolutionary music making.
In Le Sacre du Printemps, Stravinsky transformed painter Nicholas Roerich’s fleeting vision of a pagan ritual in which a young girl dances herself to death as a sacrifice to the god of Spring into a musical simulation of barbaric primality.
La noche de los Mayas, originally scored for a 1939 film, is one of Mexico’s musical treasures. This concert suite, edited by José Ives Limantour, dating to 1961, evokes a mystical lost world.
Introduction
The Augurs of Spring: Dances of the Young Girls
Ritual of Abduction
Spring Rounds
Ritual of the Rival Tribes
Procession of the Sage
The Sage
Dance of the Earth
Introduction (Largo)
Mystic Circles of the Young Girls
Glorification of the Chosen One
Evocation of the Ancestors
Ritual Action of the Ancestors
Sacrificial Dance (The Chosen One)
1. Noche de los Mayas (Molto sostenuto)
2. Noche de Jaranas (Scherzo)
3. Noche de Yucatan (Andante espressivo)
4. Noche de Encantamiento (Tema y variaciones)
4th June 2010
“Dudamel adopts a romantic view of the 20th-century landmark...[in La Noche de los Mayas] Dudamel hustles his young charges through juggernaut drumming, craggy chords and sassy melodies of a kind Copland mimicked in El Salón México.”
13th June 2010
***
“The Venezuelan players are well drilled. In Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring they play with drive and force; they follow the contours of the music; they do the things that the score implies. They are impressive in the visceral climaxes and propulsive rhythms...if Revueltas is a passion, the CD is a must.”
August 2010
*****
“...a Rite that develops thrilling momentum twice over, fast but without haste. It's the outcome of well-judged pacing and an awareness that extremes of pace and weight have to be kept for real climaxes...Details are fine, unexaggerated, and they add up...Astonishing playing; astonishing music.”
Daniel Ross
7th June 2010
“...the verve of these performers is quite incredible. But can they convincingly handle The Rite, with its batty accelarations and daringly skewed rhythmic idiosyncracies? Happily, the answer is resoundingly positive throughout. Alongside the gusto and through the joie de vivre of this orchestra, they are truly microscopic in their detail.”
Click on any of the works listed above for alternative recordings.
Introduction
