We don’t know if it’s the Rite of Spring and of Fire Bird of Stravinsky or an extension of Pictures at an exhibition, consisting, on the part of the conductor, in highlighting, in a greedy and somewhat passive way, the main sound assets of the Orchester de Paris. All this is “round and elegant”, like a sound forest painted more in a style of the shores of Seurat than of the contrasting paintings of Caravaggio. The tone is announced immediately in The coronation, which begins with a poetry of the winds worthy of Karel Ancerl, but hardly tips over into savagery. We are therefore very far from Bernstein-New York, Ozawa-Chicago, Dorati-Minneapolis and Muti-Philadelphia. Same in Fire Bird. We can claim Rimsky-Korsakov while having the sharp line (“Appearance of the bird” in Dorati). So Mäkelä digs into polyphony and spectrum (bass drum in “L’entrée de Kastcheï”), but without sharpening his baton. This gives rise to a new genre: the “Stravinsky bread gilt”, well soaked and soft.
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