Classical Music | Cello Music

Recorded on 06/07/2016, uploaded on 06/07/2016

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Suite Italienne, for Cello and Piano            Igor Stravinsky, transcribed by Gregor Piatigorsky

Suite Italienne was derived from Stravinsky’s luminous score for Pulcinella, the 1920 ballet based on works of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710–1736). The ballet became a success, and its style led the way to a new attitude about the relationship between 20th-century music and that of earlier eras – a trend that became known as “Neo-Classicism.” In 1922, Stravinsky extracted an orchestral suite from Pulcinella. Three years later, he arranged five of its numbers for violin and piano, and with the help of the virtuoso Gregor Piatigorsky in 1932, he transcribed four of the same movements for cello and piano. The following year, Stravinsky reworked the 1925 violin suite with Dushkin’s advice, added a sixth movement (the Scherzino), and issued it as the Suite Italienne.

The plot of Pulcinella was based on an 18th- century manuscript of commedia dell’arte plays that Sergei Diaghilev discovered in Naples. Though the Suite Italienne is a sort of vest-pocket version of the original ballet, it fully captures the wit, insouciance, and joie de vivre that place this music among the most delicious of all Stravinsky’s creations.              Notes by Dr. Richard E. Rodda

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.