April has been a big music month so far and is about to get big­ger.  I’ll have arti­cles pub­lished soon on the Andriessen events, this year’s MATA fes­ti­val and a very spe­cial con­cert ded­i­cated to the legacy of Vivian Perlis, as well as a bunch of CD reviews.  But I just wanted to pass on some inter­est­ing items from the Russ­ian Stravin­sky fes­ti­val, which has now began, and promises to be huge in every way.  The Phil has stream­ing audio avail­able on their web­site of Stravin­sky lead­ing the orches­tra in a 1946 per­for­mance of his Sym­phony in Three Move­ments.  The sound qual­ity is lim­ited, of course, but decent, the per­for­mance is blis­ter­ing.  This sym­phony is one of his lesser-known mas­ter­pieces, and although he was a lim­ited con­duc­tor, he always brought out the best in this piece.  It’s a great lis­ten espe­cially if you’re only famil­iar with the early, Russ­ian ballets.

And, here’s video of the com­poser lead­ing the Phil in the Fire­bird.  Along with being arguably the great­est artist of the past 150 years, Stravin­sky loved to make his roy­al­ties and fees, and often booked him­self as con­duc­tor to for the extra cash.  You can see he didn’t have much in the way of skills, but with a good orches­tra that didn’t need a tech­ni­cal direc­tion, he could bring out strong and unique performances.