Charles Dutoit will direct the composer’s tribute to Rimsky-Korsakov with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in June 2017.

The Sydney Symphony Orchestra has announced the Australian premiere performance of Stravinsky’s rediscovered Funeral Song to take place in June next year. Charles Dutoit will conduct the SSO in Pogrebal’naya Pesnya, a 12-minute work written by the young composer as a memorial tribute to his former St. Petersburg teacher Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, at the Sydney Opera House.

The music to this, one of Stravinsky’s earliest works (designated his Opus 5) vanished from the history books following its only performance in 1909 as part of the first Russian Symphony Concert in memory of Rimsky-Korsakov, performed by Count Sheremetev’s orchestra and conducted by Felix Blumenfeld who substituted for an indisposed Alexander Glazunov. The work only turned up last year in the library of the St. Petersburg Rimsky-Korsakov State Conservatory.

^{Rimsky-Korsakov’s funeral, 1909}

“The score of this work unfortunately disappeared in Russia during the Revolution, along with many other things which I had left there,” wrote Stravinsky in The Chronicle of My Life. “I can remember the idea at the root of its conception, which was that all...