8 Aug 2019

STRAVINSKY: Pulcinella Suite

From Music Alive, 8:00 pm on 8 August 2019

Baroque music re-imagined by the mind of Stravinsky.

Tung-Chieh Chuang

Tung-Chieh Chuang Photo: Harald Hoffman, supplied

In the Pulcinella Suite Stravinsky owes his inspiration to the 18th century composer Pergolesi – as well as other lesser-known composers who'd taken advantage of Pergolesi's reputation and the non-existence of copyright, to compose under his name.

This tonal shift which became Stravinsky's 'neo-classical' period was inspired by a familiar face in the composer's story – famed impresario, Sergei Diaghilev. Only seven years before, the two between them had set Paris alight with the controversial ballet The Rite of Spring following the hits of The Firebird and Petrushka.

Now, in 1919, Diaghilev was sniffing out another potential winner in the form of a ballet around the stock Pulcinella character from Italian commedia dell'arte. He'd settled on Pergolesi as the music to be used. Despite initial misgivings, Stravinsky 'looked and fell in love'.

Stravinsky began, he said, by "composing on the Pergolesi manuscripts themselves, as though I were correcting an old work of my own. I could not produce a 'forgery'...  at best, I could repeat him in my own accent."

What he produced the following year was not an original composition, but more than just an arrangement – not what Diaghilev had expected.

Noted Stravinsky: "Diaghilev hadn’t even considered the possibility of such a thing. A stylish orchestration was what he wanted, and nothing more, and my music so shocked him that he went about for a long time with a look that suggested The Offended Eighteenth Century."

With Stravinsky composing, Picasso designing, and the talented young Léonide Massine the choreographer, Pulcinella was indeed a huge success.

Stravinsky arranged the concert-hall suite about 18 months later.

Diaghilev and Stravinsky both believed that the music they were using was by Pergolesi, but later scholarship has determined that most of it is by a variety of other composers.

Programme note by Kevin Keys

Recorded by RNZ in Auckland Town Hall, 8 August 2019
Producer: Tim Dodd; Engineer: Rangi Powick

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