Ilan Volkov: BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra - Stravinsky: The Fairy's Kiss & Sc�nes de ballet

A second disc of Stravinsky�s ballet music from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Ilan Volkov, this time featuring the composer�s fascinating recreation of the music of Tchaikovsky.Stravinsky�s advocation of the�then unfashionable�music of Tchaikovsky was well-known: he was a public champion of the composer over the Russian �nationalists� such as Rimsky-Korsakov. In 1928, Stravinsky was commissioned by Ida Rubinstein to compose a ballet for her company�s season which was based on music by Tchaikovsky. Stravinsky probably envisaged a set of free orchestrations, but the music seems to have taken over and dictated its own terms, with the result that Stravinsky soon found himself entangled in a complex recreative process, and having to compose day and night to get the work completed in time for the first performance, never mind the early deadline. The result�The Fairy�s Kiss�is a complex and highly original masterpiece. As a whole the outcome is wonderfully disconcerting, and brilliantly challenges our perhaps too comfortable way of listening to late romantic music.Sc�nes de ballet is in its way another �recreation��a ballet �after Giselle� written for performance on Broadway in 1944. Stravinsky devised a semi-abstract scenario with vague allusions to Giselle among other nineteenth-century ballets; and then proceeded to compose, as it were, �away from� such models, to the extent that his music constantly suggests their ethos and formulae but always through a neoclassical prism and without direct quotation.