One doesn't think of
Stravinsky
as a composer of symphonies, and the three works here are not among the most commonly played of his orchestral works. Certainly, they have all been recorded before, and individual tastes may run to recordings other than these by the
Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia
and conductor
Dima Slobodeniouk
. Yet this album, the first in a set of two (presumably the
Symphony of Psalms
and the early
Symphony in E flat major
are still to come), has something that
Slobodeniouk
's rivals don't, namely that it takes
at his word as a practitioner of symphonic form. These are angular examples of the composer's neoclassical language, requiring precision and balance from the performers in, for example, the interplay of piano and harp in the
Symphony in Three Movements
. The music receives this throughout. More broadly, these works gain something from being heard together. What did
mean by a "symphony"? His models were primarily in the Baroque era rather than in the Classical period when the symphony genre had its inception. He seems to have conceived of the word as signifying some kind of larger-scale organizational principle. The
Symphony in C
is especially interesting in this regard;
points out that it is not in C major or C minor but simply in C, like
Terry Riley
's famed
minimalist work
. This is an absorbing release, well-recorded as usual by the
BIS
label, that sheds new light on an underappreciated facet of
's output. ~ James Manheim