If it's a budget-price CD Rite you seek then Mackerras's exciting and illuminating account on EMI Eminence has to be your first choice. Neither Bernstein nor Dorati are consistently in that class, though Bernstein's command of the piece can never for a moment be doubted, and characteristically he pulls off page after page of ferocious excitement. The ''Dance of the Earth'' may not be especially well delineated from a textural point of view, but its animalistic impact is hair-raising. So, too, the ''Sacrificial Dance''. In general, I would still express a preference for Bernstein's earlier New York Philharmonic account: it is tighter rhythmically and, for all its sonic limitations, far more truthful as a recording. This somewhat lurid Abbey Road production dates, you may recall, from the advent of quadraphony and deposits us in the midst of an oddly cavernous environment with brass choirs artifically far-flung and woodwind thrown into unnatural foreground relief. I can't say I find it anymore convincing now than I did on LP.
That, of course, is where the Dorati Rite scores. Decca's recording is one of the finest ever accorded the piece, stunning in its clarity and presence. Yet, not even Decca's technical brilliance can disguise the fact that here is a singularly ordinary performance—no match for the urgency and coiled-spring tensions of Dorati's earlier Mercury reading. Everything falls squarely, sturdily into place, but nowhere is there ever a sense of impending danger; of the primitive and the unhinged in unholy alliance. Petrushka fares better: affectionate and, where needs be robust with personable Detroit woodwinds sensitively etching in the intimate behind-the-scenes drama. Dorati still cannot seriously challenge the likes of Rattle/EMI and Dutoit/Decca (full-price) in the poster-coloured outer tableaux (one or two of his tempos are a little on the sedate side) and I will always regret that both of Bernstein's versions don't sound better. That again is a problem with his 1960 recording of the Pulcinella suite. This aggressively close coarse-grained sound flatters no one, least of all Stravinsky. The rustic commedia dell'arte elements come over with a certain energetic bluster but elegance, it seems, has no place here.'