Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring (with Revueltas - La noche de los Mayas)

"Dudamel adopts a romantic view of the 20th-century landmark...[in La Noche de los Mayas] Dudamel hustles his young charges through juggernaut drumming, craggy chords and sassy melodies of a kind Copland mimicked in El Salón México." The Times, 4th June 2010

"The Venezuelan players are well drilled. In Stravinsky's Rite of Spring they play with drive and force; they follow the contours of the music; they do the things that the score implies. They are impressive in the visceral climaxes and propulsive rhythms...if Revueltas is a passion, the CD is a must." The Telegraph, 13th June 2010 ***

"...a Rite that develops thrilling momentum twice over, fast but without haste. It's the outcome of well-judged pacing and an awareness that extremes of pace and weight have to be kept for real climaxes...Details are fine, unexaggerated, and they add up...Astonishing playing; astonishing music." BBC Music Magazine, August 2010 *****

Gustavo Dudamel elicits high octane playing from his Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela in these two full-frontal force orchestral pieces. Both Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps and Revueltas's La noche de los Mayas are revealed as models of revolutionary music making.

In Le Sacre du Printemps, Stravinsky transformed painter Nicholas Roerich's fleeting vision of a pagan ritual in which a young girl dances herself to death as a sacrifice to the god of Spring into a musical simulation of barbaric primality.

La noche de los Mayas, originally scored for a 1939 film, is one of Mexico's musical treasures. This concert suite, edited by José Ives Limantour, dating to 1961, evokes a mystical lost world.