Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Stravinsky: A Symphony of Psalms; Sacred Works

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

I'm surprised to note that over the course of three and a half decades of lyric theater broadcasting, I have neglected to air Igor Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms (1930, rev. 1948). Although not very long in duration, it is one of Stravinsky's major works for chorus and orchestra. Stravinsky chose verses from Psalms 39, 40, and 150. This Easter Sunday I make up for my negligence with a 1963 recording that features the composer himself conducting. The recording was made in Toronto, Canada with the Festival Singers of Toronto and the CBC Symphony Orchestra. This now historic audio document was taken up into Sony Classical's "Igor Stravinsky Edition," a multivolume CD reissue in 2006 of all those early stereo tapings of Stravinsky conducting his own works made in the 1950's and 1960's for Columbia Masterworks.

A Symphony of Psalms is lumped in with Stravinsky's other purely instrumental symphonies in Sony's Volume Four, but I think it more properly belongs with all his other sacred works of a choral nature contained in Volume Eleven. These works fill out two generously-timed compact discs. Stravinsky leads the CBC Symphony again in some of the tapings, but also the Columbia Symphony Orchestra, Gregg Smith Singers and LA Festival Symphony Orchestra and Chorus.