The Rite of Spring - Recordings

Recordings

Before the first gramophone disc recordings of The Rite were issued in 1929, Stravinsky had helped to produce a pianola version of the work for the Aeolian Company. He also created a much more comprehensive arrangement for the French player piano company Pleyel, with whom he signed a contract in 1923 under which many of his early works were reproduced on this medium. The Pleyel version of The Rite of Spring was issued in 1921; the British pianolist Rex Lawson recorded the work in this form in 1990

In 1929 Stravinsky and Monteux vied with each other to conduct the first gramophone recording of The Rite. While Stravinsky led L'Orchestre des Concerts Straram in a recording for the Columbia label, at the same time Monteux was recording it for the HMV label. Stokowski's version followed in 1930. Stravinsky made two more recordings, in 1940 and 1960. According to the critic Edward Greenfield, Stravinsky was not technically a great conductor but, Greenfield says, in the 1960 recording with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra the composer inspired a performance with "extraordinary thrust and resilience". In conversations with Robert Craft, Stravinsky reviewed several recordings of The Rite made in the 1960s. Of Herbert von Karajan's 1963 recording with the Berlin Philharmonic, Stravinsky commented: "The recording is generally good, the performance is ... too polished, a pet savage rather than a real one". Pierre Boulez, with the Orchestre National de France (1963), was "less good than I had hoped ... very bad tempi and some tasteless alterations". A recording by The Moscow State Symphony Orchestra in 1962 was complimented on making the music sound Russian "which is just right", but Stravinsky's concluding judgement is that none of these three performances is worth preserving.

As of 2012 there are well over 100 different recordings of The Rite commercially available, and many more held in library sound archives. It has became one of the most recorded of all 20th century musical works. Addressing this wealth of recorded versions, Stefan Goldmann produced an electronically edited version cutting through dozens of recordings, while claiming that the score itself wasn't altered.