Album review: Philippe Jordan, Orchestre de L'Opéra De Paris Debussy, Stravinsky, Ravel (Naïve)

Philippe Jordan, Orchestre de L'Opéra De Paris Debussy, Stravinsky, Ravel (Naïve)

The Orchestre de l'Opéra de Paris has supported adventurous ballet productions throughout the past century, and here offers a spirited programme of three iconic works of late-19th/early-20th-century modernism, now such staples of the canon it's hard to imagine the outrage they once incited.

Of the three, it's Stravinsky's “Rite of Spring” that still contains the power to shock, crammed as it is with thunderous percussive crescendos, blaring horn ostinatos and those emblematic chugging strings viscerally evoking the atavistic lure of its ritual pagan sacrifice. Meanwhile Debussy's “Prélude à l'Après-Midi d'un Faune” offers a voluptuous, mazy basking in the afternoon heat.

Download: The Rite of Spring; Prélude à l'Après-Midi d'un Faune; Bolero