Rite - Stravinsky: Le Sacre du Printemps / Revueltas: La Noche de los Mayas

Gustavo Dudamel's two full-frontal force orchestral pieces elicit high octane playing from his Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela. Both Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps and Revueltas's La noche de los Mayas are revealed as models of revolutionary music making. In Le Sacre du Printemps, Stravinsky transformed painter Nicholas Roerich's fleeting vision of a pagan ritual in which a young girl dances herself to death as a sacrifice to the god of Spring into a musical simulation of barbaric primality. La noche de los Mayas, originally scored for a 1939 film, is one of Mexico's musical treasures. This concert suite, edited by Jos Ives Limantour, dating to 1961, evokes a mystical lost world.