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Wednesday, June 17, 2009

L'Oiseau de Feu

Here's birthday boy Igor Stravinsky conducting the end of The Firebird, London, 1965, in a lovely and soft-grained performance:


Today's Google logo should eventually be on permanent display here.

Bonus clip: Stravinsky conducting sometime in the 1920s. Silent footage with the orchestra in cramped quarters. The composer made some records in the 20s and 30s with the Walter Straram Orchestra; could this footage be from one of those sessions? Do you have any idea what the work might be?


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4 comments:

  1. AnonymousJune 17, 2009 at 2:55:00 PM PDT

    There's something you don't see every day: a composer conducting a work he'd written over 50 years earlier. I wonder if, by this point, he felt about it as Tolkien once said of The Lord of the Rings: as if it had been written by a distant relative.

    He seems very pleased by the sound at the very end, doesn't he?

    As for the second work, I can't tell, but it can't be Le Sacre, can it? Far too regular a rhythm.

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  2. Lisa HirschJune 17, 2009 at 5:21:00 PM PDT

    Not all of Sacre is irregular. What we know: it's something written by the date of the film, it involves at least one mallet instrument, and it contains at least 15 or so seconds of music in straight duple meter.

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  3. Robert F. JonesJune 17, 2009 at 5:36:00 PM PDT

    Could it be the Chinese March from The Song of the Nightingale?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Lisa HirschJune 18, 2009 at 9:19:00 AM PDT

    Maybe!

    ReplyDelete

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