This recording received the 2000 Grammy awards for "Best Classical Album" and "Best Orchestral Performance." Here's a slightly odd trio. 'The Firebird' and 'The Rite of Spring' are two of the three ballets that so sensationally launched Igor Stravinsky's career, but instead of including the intervening 'Petrouchka,' the package features 'Persephone,' a difficult-to-classify work from two decades later. Dancer Ida Rubenstein commissioned this combination of rhythmic narration, singing, and dance, hooking Stravinsky up with writer Andre Gide to concoct a telling of the myth of Persephone, daughter of the fertility goddess Demeter, whose journey to the underworld causes winter to descend upon the Earth. It is a kinder, gentler, classicized 'Rite of Spring' of sorts, and one of Stravinsky's freshest, most beautiful, and sadly neglected scores. All three works receive alert, sensitive, and wonderfully colorful performances from Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony, made all the more alluring by a truly sensational recording.
