Sir Simon Rattle, Berliner Philharmoniker - Stravinsky꞉ Le Sacre du printemps (2013)

The Rite of Spring, original French title, Le sacre du printemps, is a 1913 ballet with music by the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. After the premiere the writer Leon Vallas opined that Stravinsky had written music 30 years ahead of its time, suitable to be heard in 1940. Coincidentally, it was in that year that Walt Disney released Fantasia, an animated feature film based on music from The Rite. Over the years, Le Sacre du printemps has remained Stravinsky's best known work due in large part to its musical uniqueness the innovative, complex rhythmic structures, timbres and use of dissonance.

In a year which sees the 100th anniversary of its milestone premiere, EMI Classics releases an exciting new recording of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, with Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Also on the disc are new recordings of Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments and Apollon Musagète, another of the Russian master's ballets (and one of his most serene).

Sir Simon Rattle says of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring: It's probably no accident that Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, which is really the seminal work of the twentieth century in so many ways, happened in 1913, just before the greatest conflagration that the world had ever known...Stravinsky talked of trying to recapture the violence, this sense of the Earth cracking open, that he witnessed ever spring in Russia...but on a deeper level, it's a musical metaphor, for the vessel of an exhausted era cracking open.

Sir Simon Rattle has been an exclusive EMI artist for more than 32 years, and has recorded over 250 works with the label. He has received three Grammy Awards, three Classical Brit and Gramophone Awards in the UK and two Echo Klassik Awards in Germany to date. Most recently, Sir Simon Rattle appeared at the 2012 Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony in London conducting the London Symphony Orchestra.