Although I could see snow falling out­side my win­dows this morn­ing, and the sun has been scarce the last cou­ple of days, the cal­en­dar tells me it’s spring … and there is baseball.

So today means it’s time to put the CD’s of Robert Schumann’s Spring Sym­phony and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in the player. What, you say you don’t have those record­ings? Then may I offer some recommendations;

For Schu­mann, there are excel­lent per­for­mances from Leonard Bern­stein and Daniel Baren­boim, and my per­sonal favorite is the period instru­ments record­ing from Roy Good­man and The Hanover Band (cur­rently out of print).

The Rite of Spring is gen­er­ally famous now, and there are many record­ings; the one led by the com­poser him­self is excel­lent, there are also fine ones from Robert Craft, Pierre Boulez, Charles Dutoit and Clau­dio Abbado, but for me the most intense and pow­er­ful one comes from Ric­cardo Muti and the Philadel­phia Orches­tra. I first heard it in my Stravin­sky sem­i­nar and grad school, and my first ques­tion was “who made that recod­ing?!” Enjoy, good people.