Riccardo Chailly / Lucerne Festival Orchestra STRAVINSKY Chant Funèbre - Le Sacre du Printemps

In 2015, an early piece by Stravinsky, lost for over a century, made headlines when it was rediscovered among a pile of manuscripts in the St Petersburg Conservatory. Chant Funèbre was composed in 1908, after the death of Stravinsky’s teacher Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and it received a single performance at a concert in the conservatory the following January. But then the score and parts disappeared, and though Stravinsky himself remembered it as one of the best of his early works, the assumption was that it had been destroyed during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution.

Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra gave the first modern performance of Chant Funèbre in St Petersburg in December 2016, and subsequently the piece has been performed around the world. Decca secured the rights to make the first commercial recording, however, and it features on Riccardo Chailly’s first disc with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, devoted to early Stravinsky.

What makes Chant Funèbre so fascinating is not that it illuminates more detail of Stravinsky’s journey towards the three ballet scores for Diaghilev that would make his name, but how it reveals a path he would not explore any further. In this steady processional, the highly coloured world inherited from Rimsky is replaced by something much darker and more Wagnerian; there are hints of Parsifal especially.

Chailly follows it with three other early pieces – Fireworks and the Scherzo Fantastique, and the tiny Pushkin settings of Le Faune et la Bergère (in which the mezzo Sophie Koch is the subtly nuanced soloist) – each of which hints at what was soon to come, while Chant Funèbre very definitely stands apart.

The whole sequence, brilliantly coloured and played with immaculate precision by the LFO, takes up half of this disc. It is followed by an equally brilliant account of The Rite of Spring, though one that takes a little while to catch fire. It’s more detailed, and more measured, than the version Chailly recorded in 1985 with the Cleveland Orchestra, but equally convincing in its own way. (Andrew Clements / The Guardian)