The Rite of Spring too polished, a pet savage rather than a real one". Stravinsky thought that Pierre Boulez, with the Orchestre National de France (1963), was "less good than I had hoped ... very bad tempi and some tasteless alterations". He praised a 1962 recording by The Moscow State Symphony Orchestra for making the music sound Russian, "which is just right", but Stravinsky's concluding judgement was that none of these three performances was worth preserving. As of 2013 there were well over 100 different recordings of "The Rite" commercially available, and many more held in library sound archives. It has become one of
The Firebird leader. The lead role was fanced by Michel Denard. The Mariinsky Ballet performed the original choreography at Covent Garden in August 2011, as part of their Fokine retrospective. The National Ballet of Canada created a version of the "Firebird" for television, occasionally rebroadcast, in which special effects were used to make it appear that the Firebird is in flight. On 29 March 2012, the American Ballet Theatre premiered the ballet with choreography by Alexei Ratmansky at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, California, starring Misty Copeland. The ballet centers on the journey of its hero, Prince Ivan.