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
Picasso and the Ballets Russes travel back to the land of human beings" after spending time with Diaghilev. Diaghilev, however, valued Picasso's work, and the drop curtain he created for "Le Train Bleu" - the painting of which was completed not by Picasso, but by Prince Alexander Schervashidze - was deemed so impressive that Diaghilev used it as the logo for the Ballets Russes. The writer Jean Cocteau, who introduced Picasso to Diaghilev, wrote the scenario for "Parade", and was Picasso’s neighbor in Rome said, "Picasso amazes me every day, to live near him is a lesson in nobility and hard work ... A badly