Royal Academy of Music Manson Ensemble & Oliver Knussen - Stravinsky: The Soldier's Tale - The Sunday Times

This remarkable disc sets Stravinsky's music-theatre piece The Soldier's Tale beside 12 minutes of miniaturised instrumental and memorial music by him and by Maxwell Davies (two fascinating, cryptic canons) and Birtwistle, those composers so productively influenced by Stravinsky and the notion of music-theatre. Following an American tradition of fielding composer-speakers, Birtwistle, gruffly northern, takes the role of the Soldier, and Davies would have been the Devil had he lived. Instead, the composer George Benjamin fluently participates. Harriet Walter is the narrator.