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?


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

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.

Lisa Hirsch said...

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.

Robert F. Jones said...

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