The Butchershop Quartet THE RITE OF SPRING (Galapagos 4)

No, that’s not a bassoon tracing that unfurling melody like the vaporous ascent of primæval mist but a guitar. Chicago’s Butchershop Quartet have recast Stravinsky’s discordant 1913 orgy Le sacre du printemps as a piece for rock quartet. And though that riot-inducing succès de scandale has lost some of its original power to shock and surprise, the band’s muscular and cerebral performance affords appropriate urgency and power. The distillation of an orchestral piece down to two guitars, bass, and drums necessitates flexibility, and the four-piece demonstrate fluency, flitting between quiet idylls and monstrously strident cacophony, loose swing and studied avant-garde tinkering. But their reverent reading by and large sticks to the text.

Other rock-informed bands (Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, for one) have flirted with excerpts from Sacre. But the Quartet — comprising members of/collaborators with Nad Navillus, Songs: Ohia, and the Frames — do the whole thing. From the first augurs of spring to the pagan conflagrations of "Sacrificial Dance," their surehandedness makes for a thrilling, jarring ride. The introduction finds two guitars snaking together in expressive, delicate precision, with an increasing sense of dissonance and agitation only hinting at the bedlam to come. "Ritual of Abduction" couples frenetic fretting with thunderous percussive blows. "Ritual Action of the Ancestors" builds from an ominous rumbling bass into intricate high-end trills, then descends into a savage onslaught of searing noise. When the dust clears, we’ve been given a lesson in just how deeply, if subliminally, Stravinsky’s paragon of modernism has influenced certain strains of contemporary rock.

(The Butchershop Quartet perform this Sunday, March 28, at Zeitgeist Gallery, 1353 Cambridge Street in Inman Square; call 617-876-6060.)