The years 1928–9, when Stravinsky first recorded his Russian ballets, have not yet passed beyond living memory. And yet, when it comes to the history of performance (and especially of orchestral performance, since recording so large a group of musicians became possible only with the development of electrical recording around 1925), this is a remote and only just recoverable past. It is true that the pianola versions of The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring push the horizon back to the early 1920s, but the ballets' premieres, from the last years before the First World War, lie altogether within the long, silent, initial phase of music history. Stravinsky recorded each of them on a number of occasions (he recorded The Rite, for instance, in 1929, 1940 and 1960), and in this way the history of these works unfolded, as Peter Hill puts it, ‘exactly in tandem with the emerging record industry’. Successive developments in recording technology represent one of the reasons why Stravinsky recorded many of his works several times: the 78 gave way to the LP in 1948 and to the stereo LP in 1957. (‘Last year's record is as démodé as last year's motor car,’ Stravinsky wryly observed.) But there were further reasons. One was Stravinsky's financial dependence on recording and more generally on conducting, as a result of the drying up of his Russian royalties following the 1917 Revolution; there is a terrible irony in the fact that Stravinsky's career as neoclassical and serial composer was bankrolled by nearly a thousand performances of The Firebird. The other reason takes longer to explain, for it opens up the whole issue of Stravinsky's intentions as a recording artist.