Amazing pieces of classical music - 49
The Pulcinella Suite by Igor Stravinsky, arranged from the ballet (1920 arr. ca. 1922 rev. 1947) in a performance by the Academy of St Martin in the Fields under their conductor Neville Marriner recorded at Kingsway Hall, London, under the Argos label between 13–17 November 1967.
Claudio Abbado’s recording with the London Symphony Orchestra (DG) is frequently cited as the best, most elegant, and immaculately played complete recording of Stravinsky's Pulcinella. For the shorter Suite, Neville Marriner’s recording with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields (EMI/Argo) is highly acclaimed for its brilliance and polish.
Pulcinella is from the Italian commedia dell’arte: a clever, scheming trickster who always seems to wriggle out of trouble. Dressed in white with a long-nosed black mask, part clown, part philosopher, and entirely unpredictable. His antics inspired the plot for the ballet: a tangle of flirtations, disguises, and mistaken identities set in bustling Naples.
The idea came from Sergei Diaghilev, the visionary impresario behind the Ballets Russes, who handed Stravinsky some 18th-century music then attributed to Pergolesi (now known to be trio sonatas by the Italian composer Dominico Gallo), and asked him to orchestrate it.
Stravinsky agreed reluctantly, but soon found himself captivated. Rather than simply arranging the old tunes, he re-imagined them - adding sharp harmonies, fresh rhythms, and his own unmistakable wit. The result was Pulcinella: part baroque masquerade, part 20th-century reinvention.
This charming fusion marked the birth of Stravinsky’s “neoclassical” style, a return to the clarity and balance of earlier music, but filtered through modern ears. Its elegance and humor hide subtle complexities; every phrase feels both familiar and freshly minted.
Listening to Pulcinella is like watching an old master painting spring to life with contemporary colour. Beneath its graceful surface dances the spirit of Pulcinella himself - winking, playful, and full of surprises. Stravinsky may have looked to the past, but with Pulcinella, he created something timeless.
It was to recover a seemingly distant and incompatible past with expressionist ferment, a baroque past, bringing it into its own era and its own way of writing. The scores of Pergolesi, struck the sensitivity of Stravinsky and Diaghilev who took full possession of it, denaturing them to such an extent as to make them totally alien to the Baroque.
Little does it matter then the discussions on the true authorship of the scores, remember the stupid rejection of many critics who considered it a disrespectful operation. What counts is that once again the Russian composer managed to accomplish something new and special.
While the ballet initially written in 1919 required a small orchestra and solo voices, in 1949 Stravinsky made a transposition in an instrumental-only version, the "Pulcinella suite". In eight movements, passing through serenades scheris and minuets of arcane memory, there's a progressive disintegration of the original structure.
There's a dialogue between past and present, where one loses the very cognition of what is past and what is present. A perfect description of the literary subject of Pulcinella, so that Stravinsky once again achieves with impressive verism the lie of music as an expression of something that is not just itself.
Let me end with the notice that Abbado left some of the finest recordings of Stravinsky available. One might think of his series of early ballets with the LSO on DG from the 1970’s (Petrushka was in fairness only recorded in 1980); his London-recorded Pulcinella and Jeu de cartes from that period are indeed delightful.
[media=https://youtu.be/ZZ1vuWKaRNA]
Claudio Abbado’s recording with the London Symphony Orchestra (DG) is frequently cited as the best, most elegant, and immaculately played complete recording of Stravinsky's Pulcinella. For the shorter Suite, Neville Marriner’s recording with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields (EMI/Argo) is highly acclaimed for its brilliance and polish.
Pulcinella is from the Italian commedia dell’arte: a clever, scheming trickster who always seems to wriggle out of trouble. Dressed in white with a long-nosed black mask, part clown, part philosopher, and entirely unpredictable. His antics inspired the plot for the ballet: a tangle of flirtations, disguises, and mistaken identities set in bustling Naples.
The idea came from Sergei Diaghilev, the visionary impresario behind the Ballets Russes, who handed Stravinsky some 18th-century music then attributed to Pergolesi (now known to be trio sonatas by the Italian composer Dominico Gallo), and asked him to orchestrate it.
Stravinsky agreed reluctantly, but soon found himself captivated. Rather than simply arranging the old tunes, he re-imagined them - adding sharp harmonies, fresh rhythms, and his own unmistakable wit. The result was Pulcinella: part baroque masquerade, part 20th-century reinvention.
This charming fusion marked the birth of Stravinsky’s “neoclassical” style, a return to the clarity and balance of earlier music, but filtered through modern ears. Its elegance and humor hide subtle complexities; every phrase feels both familiar and freshly minted.
Listening to Pulcinella is like watching an old master painting spring to life with contemporary colour. Beneath its graceful surface dances the spirit of Pulcinella himself - winking, playful, and full of surprises. Stravinsky may have looked to the past, but with Pulcinella, he created something timeless.
It was to recover a seemingly distant and incompatible past with expressionist ferment, a baroque past, bringing it into its own era and its own way of writing. The scores of Pergolesi, struck the sensitivity of Stravinsky and Diaghilev who took full possession of it, denaturing them to such an extent as to make them totally alien to the Baroque.
Little does it matter then the discussions on the true authorship of the scores, remember the stupid rejection of many critics who considered it a disrespectful operation. What counts is that once again the Russian composer managed to accomplish something new and special.
While the ballet initially written in 1919 required a small orchestra and solo voices, in 1949 Stravinsky made a transposition in an instrumental-only version, the "Pulcinella suite". In eight movements, passing through serenades scheris and minuets of arcane memory, there's a progressive disintegration of the original structure.
There's a dialogue between past and present, where one loses the very cognition of what is past and what is present. A perfect description of the literary subject of Pulcinella, so that Stravinsky once again achieves with impressive verism the lie of music as an expression of something that is not just itself.
Let me end with the notice that Abbado left some of the finest recordings of Stravinsky available. One might think of his series of early ballets with the LSO on DG from the 1970’s (Petrushka was in fairness only recorded in 1980); his London-recorded Pulcinella and Jeu de cartes from that period are indeed delightful.
[media=https://youtu.be/ZZ1vuWKaRNA]
