Stravinsky: Le Sacre du printemps - Ravel: Ma mère l'Oye

The piano-duet version of Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring was made by the composer himself, and has a focused ferocity which powerfully channels the explosive energy of the more familiar orchestral score. Pianists Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy had played the piece together frequently before making this 2025 recording. That is evident in the cutting unanimity of the pair’s motor-rhythms as “Augurs of Spring” launches (Track 2), and in the rumbling momentum generated in the “Dance of the Earth” concluding Part I (Track 8). But there is more to the Tsoy-Kolesnikov partnership than pile-driving ferocity, as the fine-spun textures of Part II’s “Introduction” demonstrates (Track 9). More of that delicacy surfaces in the coupling, an exquisitely weighted performance of Ravel’s Ma mère l’Oye (Mother Goose). Here, Tsoy and Kolesnikov exhibit high levels of attunement to one another’s playing, especially in their alluringly poetic account of the suite’s closing movement “Le Jardin féerique” (“The Fairy Garden”).