San Francisco Symphony & Esa-Pekka Salonen - Stravinsky: The Firebird (2024) [Hi-Res]

A groundbreaking ballet based on Russian folk tales of the mystical Firebird, Igor Stravinsky’s The Firebird tells the story of a young prince who defeats an evil king with a golden egg. The Firebird was Stravinsky’s first major piece to garner wide acclaim, setting him on course to write The Rite of Spring and other innovative works over the next five decades. He revisited The Firebird three times (in 1911, 1919, and 1945) to create suites for concert performances. Of these, the 1919 suite is the most frequently performed; in this particular recording, Salonen and the Symphony perform the complete ballet music as Stravinsky originally conceived it.

It’s intriguing to speculate how the history of music in the last century would have been altered if the extraordinary ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev had not decided to gamble on the young, relatively unknown Stravinsky. Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes – which the émigré Russian had established in Paris – was just starting to take the West by storm, and Diaghilev wanted a splendid new production for the climax of its season in 1910. His initial plans for better-known composers fell through, so Diaghilev, on a hunch, gave the commission to Stravinsky, then in his late 20s. It was a risk for everyone concerned, since The Firebird would be the first production by the emerging ballet company to feature an entirely new score.

Stravinsky was handed a scenario (devised in part by Fokine, the show’s choreographer) that drew on old Russian folklore. The Firebird tells of the downfall of a powerful, ogre-like figure of evil, Kastchei the Deathless, through the intervention of a beautiful rare bird – the enchanting character of the title. The miraculous Firebird is so called on account of her beautiful feathers, which glitter and flicker like flames. Kastchei is in the habit of seizing pretty young princesses as captives while turning the knights who arrive to rescue them into stone. Crown Prince Ivan, the protagonist, enlists the Firebird’s help to destroy Kastchei and free his victims.

You can readily hear how Stravinsky’s own imagination must have caught fire (he even set aside his work on a bird of a different feather – the fairy-tale opera The Nightingale – to take up Diaghilev’s invitation). The Firebird’s score blends the orchestral wizardry Stravinsky had learned as a student of Rimsky-Korsakov with the vitality of Russian folk music to yield a dazzling, evocative atmosphere. Throughout his later career, Stravinsky remained especially fond of The Firebird, returning to create three different concert versions that he himself conducted tirelessly (a savvy financial move on the composer’s part). The most popular is the second of these suites, introduced in 1919, which uses less than half of the original ballet score and simplifies some of its orchestration.

The Firebird’s musical language shifts between exotic, chromatic gestures to illustrate the supernatural dimension (including a powerful non-Western scale that would later feature in the Rite of Spring’s harmonic vocabulary) and the sing-song simplicity of folk song for the mortals. The ballet opens with a spooky conjuring, low in the strings, of Kastchei’s magical realm. In his illusory garden, Prince Ivan encounters the Firebird, which is depicted with opulent colors and radiant trills. (Diaghilev spared no expense in the similarly gorgeous costumes Léon Bakst designed for this creature.) A calmly pastoral section follows, featuring Stravinsky’s already characteristically imaginative scoring for woodwinds. Prince Ivan observes the princesses who have been captured by Kastchei performing their ritual Khorovod, or round dance, and falls in love with the one destined to be his bride.

These recordings were produced and edited by Jason O’Connell. Jon Johannsen was the recording engineer, and Mark Willsher was the mastering and mixing engineer.

San Francisco Symphony
Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor