Stravinsky: Le Sacre du Printemps; Revueltas: La Noche de los Mayas

The average age of the Simón Bolívar players hardly justifies their description as a youth orchestra any more, and these performances, taken from concerts with Gustavo Dudamel in Caracas in February, never convey the youthful energy and delight in high-quality music-making that have made some of the Venezuelans' previous concerts and recordings so memorable. The account of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring is the bigger disappointment, lacking dramatic tension and characterisation through the opening sections and only gaining momentum when Dudamel contrives artificial accelerations towards the end of the first half. Its pairing with the suite of four movements taken posthumously from Silvestre Revueltas's score for the film La Noche de los Mayas (composed in 1939, a year before his death) is enterprising, yet here, too, the performance never quite captures the physicality of the music's fusion of Mexican dance rhythms with Rite of Spring-like primitivism.