Back when the word bombshell still held meaning beyond "today's news," Robert Craft used it in his book "Stravinsky: Discoveries and Memories," which appeared during the 2013 centenary of Stravinsky's revolutionary "The Rite of Spring." The composer's amanuensis included a chapter called "Amorous Augmentations," to which he gave an epigraph, an excerpt from a 1922 letter by the composer to Serge Diaghilev, director of the Ballets Russes, which gave the premieres of what remain Stravinsky's three most famous works, the ballets "The Firebird," "Petrushka" and "The Rite."
The exasperated Stravinsky wrote, "If I cannot help you with my music, what can I help you with? Despite my admiration for my male member, I am not willing to offer you consolation with it."
"An exploration of this subject is long overdue," Craft began the chapter pendant on that epigraph. In a revelation so bright-burning most music experts looked away, Craft revealed that during the time Stravinsky was working with Diaghilev, and "The Rite" in particular, he was having sex with men (while married to a deathly ill woman) and romantically involved with some of them.
Stravinsky himself said he was "in love with" Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov, the eldest son of his great teacher, though Andrey distanced himself from the notion quickly.
But Craft had more dish, the most startling perhaps that Stravinsky and Ravel, small men who stand tall among the greatest orchestrators of all time, made all manner of music together.
"Ravel and Stravinsky were, of all artists, the most successful in concealing their sexuality," Craft stated baldly, devoting additional pages to Stravinsky's yet more passionate affair with Ravel's close friend Charles Maurice Delage, who also had an influence on Stravinsky's music at the time. It takes nothing away from the brilliance of "The Rite" to acknowledge that some of its sonic signatures began as suggestions by the two influential Frenchmen.
Dispiritingly, such as the centenary revealed anything else about "The Rite" itself, it was the degree to which a work once considered so difficult as to belong only on the desks of world's greatest orchestras had somehow insinuated itself into lesser, even amateur bands, seldom to its benefit. Reassuringly, though, those not oversaturated with the piece in 2013 observed that it had lost none of its punch.
"The Rite" is back in three new recordings, all of which include extras Stravinsky adherents will find tantalizing. First is the world-premiere recording of Stravinsky's recently discovered, 1908 "Chant funebre," Op. 5, presented along with Opp. 2, 3 & 4, and "The Rite" by the Lucerne Festival Orchestra under Riccardo Chailly (Decca).
Stravinsky lamented the loss of the "Funeral Song" score, and its rediscovery in St. Petersburg in 2015 was recognized for the find it is. It's a deep tribute to his teacher, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (Andrey's father), whom he honors with a work of intense feeling that also contains elements that leaven its baseline solemnity. Much of the music is eerie and splashed with colors and sonorities that burst forth fully in "The Rite." Orchestras are already scrambling to program the piece, though there is no need for a recording beyond this one, which fully takes its measure.
Assembled from front-desk musicians from the world's greatest orchestras to play two annual festivals, the Lucerne Festival Orchestra has played under its worthy new director, Riccardo Chailly, successor to the revered Claudio Abbado, only a comparatively short time. One audible consequence is that it dispatches "The Rite" as if it's child's play, when something more warranting an X rating is called for.
I had no hope of hearing a "Rite" as elemental and hair-tearingly deracinating as the one MTT and the SF Symphony gave the night they learned that he would be its new music director. My legal cassette of a subsequent radio broadcast was nowhere near worn out when it was confiscated by the Lao police, but I digress.
Something approaching that visceral a "Rite" resurfaces in the new live recording by the London Symphony Orchestra, in a DVD/Blu-ray combo set on its house label, the concert not incidentally on the day it was settled that Simon Rattle would be its new music director. It's a writhing serpent of a performance that invades your sinews as you listen, transfixing but dangerous.
The preliminaries are Webern's Six Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6, Three Fragments from Berg's "Wozzeck" and Ligeti's "Mysteries of the Macabre." In the Berg, Barbara Hannigan sings Marie's solo music and, arrestingly, her orphan's plaintive, uncomprehending "hip-hop," in singing of devastating involvement. Dressed as a schoolgirl nymphet for the Ligeti, a piece she owns, she vamps, pouts, and sings music of impossible difficulty with incisive wit.
As importantly, Hyperion has issued Stravinsky's Two-Piano Music, including "The Rite," on a single CD that makes all previous recordings obsolete. Marc-Andre Hamelin and Leif Ove Andsnes play the two-piano "Rite" arranged from the piano-four-hands version Stravinsky made for rehearsals (and played with Debussy). They drive the orchestral monster that emerged from Stravinsky's piano version out of mind with playing that makes the work an eerie, forbidding, ultimately pulverizing ritual. Their addition of the Concerto for two solo pianos and arrangements of "Madrid," "Tango" and "Circus Polka" make this an essential Stravinsky recording.