Odd couplings. Odd performances. Daniel Barenboim’s Rite of Spring features some gorgeous playing and carefully judged orchestral balances. He uncovers all sorts of lovely wind detail in the openings of parts One and Two, maintains admirably transparent textures at the famous polyrhythmic “Procession of the Sage”, and generally has the Chicago Symphony playing with great refinement. But is this what we want from The Rite of Spring? The music never conveys a shred of pagan intensity, or power. “Spring Rounds”, for all its clarity and depth of sonority erupts with about as much physical excitement as a chess tournament, while the final dance lacks any feeling of abandon, to say nothing of the necessary brutality. Listening to the famously kinetic Chicago Symphony execute this dainty mission is rather like watching the Hippo prima ballerina in Disney’s Fantasia. The result has a certain weird grace and a corresponding perverse fascination, but little else (least of all Disney’s whimsical sense of humor).
Barenboim’s DG La Mer, with the Orchestre de Paris (last available on Penguin Classics) had a lovely, shimmering, liquid quality that compensated for its somewhat fuzzy approach to orchestral detail. This Chicago version has no such redeeming features. It’s slow, dark, thick, and heavy. Listen to the way Barenboim the control freak underplays the end of the first movement, or to his static, droopy finale, molded and nudged into a musical torpor. Notice the sonority he prefers in the outer movement brass chorales: subdued trumpets, weighty trombones and tuba. In short, he plays the music like Wagner, favoring the bass regions, a sonic framework the Orchestre de Paris couldn’t give him to save its life (thank God), but which Chicago can and does, to the great detriment of the music itself. Aside from the quality of the playing as such, this dreary performance has absolutely no positive interpretive qualities at all.
Boulez’s Notations VII gets by far the best performance on the disc; it’s a thoroughly characteristic piece of attractive, brilliantly orchestrated, atonal meandering that toys with a few simple gestures (note the figurations in muted brass) in the course of its seven minutes or so. For the Boulez alone, though, this disc represents little more than an expensive way to hear Barenboim fail in two very disparate stylistic arenas. The recorded sound is warm and rich but surprisingly light in the deep bass, and therefore, like the performances themselves, lacks the necessary impact and vividness. A virtually useless disc, unfortunately.
