Igor Stravinsky: Le Roi des Étoiles & Le Sacre du Printemps – Boston Symphony Orchestra & Michael Tilson Thomas

Within a year of its tumultuous, disrupted and destructive reception at its 1913 Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris premiere, Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) had made Igor Stravinsky, who’d written the work on commission from Sergei Diaghilev for his Ballet Russes, a household name. While working on Le Sacre, Stravinsky also wrote Le roi des étoiles, a cantata for male choir and orchestra based on a poem by the symbolist poet Konstantin Balmont that some musicologists have interpreted as a kind of Christian counterpart to the pagan images of Russia in Sacre. A young Michael Tilson Thomas leads the Boston Symphony Orchestra and, in the cantata, the Men’s Chorus of the NE Conservatory Choir in these original quadraphonic recordings from 1972, newly remastered by and released on the Pentatone label.