Stravinsky: The Firebird album review – Rattle revels in colour, crackles and bites

Bavarian Radio SO/Rattle(BR Klassik)Simon Rattle has recorded the Russian master’s fairytale ballet twice before, but this version has considerable gains, not least in Rattle’s engaging half hour talk about it

Simon Rattle and Stravinsky’s fairytale ballet go way back. A longtime staple of his repertoire, he recorded it with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in the late 1980s, a 2017 concert performance with the LSO was released in 2022. This similarly live account with his current Bavarian orchestra comes with a bonus: an engaging half-hour talk with musical examples, ideal for newcomers or anyone keen to take a deeper dive into the history of the Russian master’s breakthrough work.

All three Rattle recordings are of the complete score from 1910, though this latest interpretation is the swiftest, knocking several minutes off his previous readings and aided by an ideally natural acoustic. The gains are apparent not just in the dramatic thrust he achieves but in the diaphanous textures.

The introduction on low strings is wonderfully portentous, phrases crackling with controlled intention. Later, Rattle revels in the impressionist colours of Koschei’s enchanted garden with the help of subtly characterful woodwind. There’s a real bite to the brass, painting the deathless magician with a wicked snarl, and a percussive swing to the Infernal Dance.

As well as providing historical context, the informal chat reveals the conductor’s emotional response to both the music and his musicians. It’s at its most engaging when Rattle demonstrates how the composer “borrowed” a melody from Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera-ballet Mlada and transmuted it with shifting meters and irregular accents into Koschei’s famous dance. But then Stravinsky always did say that good composers steal.