Returning to the thread topic …. one of my “local” orchestras is the Hallé and Sir Mark Elder preferred to separate the first and second violins. I recently attended a Hallé concert, guest conducted by a young Norwegian, Tabita Berglund and noticed she also had the violins arranged that way. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when Elder leaves next year.
I reckon this works well for orchestral music up to about WW1, but beyond that composers often wrote assuming the violins were all together, sometimes dividing them into more than two parts, or treating them as a single group, perhaps with the seconds supporting the firsts an octave below. Then, antiphonal violins can bring other problems.
Perhaps the best, though impractical solution is to vary the seating according to the piece being played. I have a feeling some conductors have tried that.
I agree about the Stravinsky ballets, but I think that jumping straight into ‘The Rite Of Spring’ may be rather too much for a newcomer - remember that it caused the audience to riot at its première!
Two earlier Stravinsky ballets, ‘The Firebird’ and ‘Petroushka’, are much more approachable - you can even hum along to the tunes. If you tried to hum along to ‘The Rite’, you’d probably have an attack of hiccups!
On the matter of Stravinsky’s Firebird, I’d strongly recommend listening to the whole ballet rather than the later ‘suites’ he constructed. The shorter suites are good for programming concerts but the whole thing is so much better.
To my ears, you can hear so much in Firebird which was subsequently ripped off (ahem, I mean homaged, of course) by many later film composers, especially for sci-fi films. I find a similar thing when listening to Copland’s (fabulous) ballet music: you can hear where almost every film composer goes for inspiration for westerns.
Colin Davis made wonderful (analogue) recordings of ‘Petrushka’, ‘The Firebird’ and ‘The Rite of Spring’ with the wonderful Concertgebouw Orchestra for Philips, which I strongly recommend.
The Philips engineers really knew how to make great recordings in that concert hall (famously using QUAD ESL63 Pro electrostatics for monitoring their recordings).
