Stravinsky
's late serialist works have been performed less frequently since the crackup of High Modernist hegemony, but they have their adherents, and one of them is
Ingo Metzmacher
, here leading the
SWR Symphonieorchester
. He makes a strong case for them, including a pure serialist work, the
Variations "Aldous Huxley in Memoriam"
of 1964; a work that mixes serialist and diatonic idioms, the ballet
Agon
; and two earlier works whose economical treatments of pitch seem to offer interpretations suggesting that
was heading toward serialism even before he was actually aware of it.
Metzmacher
's readings of these two works, the
Symphony in C major
of 1940 and the 1947 revision of the
Symphonies of Wind Instruments
, stripped down from its 1920 original, are persuasive. What one will think of the program as a whole will depend on one's degree of sympathy with
's late idiom, but it is hard to argue that the album is anything other than unusually cohesive. Perhaps the strongest work is
, wherein
's incipient serialism is heralded by a new perspective on Renaissance dances the composer got from a Renaissance dance manual. This work shows
's precise way with
and his ability to elicit precision from the
SWR Symponieorchester
at their best, and the clean performances are all the more impressive, considering that they were recorded live. This recording will fill holes in many
libraries. ~ James Manheim