Valery Gergiev gives this intriguing work its first performance in a century at the Mariinsky.

Just a few days after the Sydney Symphony Orchestra announced its Australian premiere as part of their 2017 season, Igor Stravinsky’s Funeral Song has received its first performance in over a century at the Mariinsky Theatre. The work, written to commemorate the death of Stravinsky’s teacher Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, was conducted by Valery Gergiev and recorded for broadcast on Medici TV and Mezzo.

The parts for the 12-minute piece, Pogrebal’naya Pesnya, disappeared following its only performance in 1909 and only turned up last year in the library of the St. Petersburg Rimsky-Korsakov State Conservatory thanks to some detective work by musicologist Natalia Braginskaya and the efforts of State Conservatory librarian Irina Sidorenko. It was a serendipitous relocation of library stock in 2015 that saw the Funeral Song disinterred from behind a pile of scores in a back room of the musical archives where it had lain for decades.

“The piece made a powerful impression in a somewhat ungainly way,” writes Ivan Hewitt in the UK’s Daily Telegraph. “The groping bass at the opening seemed like the beginning of The...