Classical Music | Cello Music

Recorded on 06/29/2011, uploaded on 01/17/2012

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Stravinsky's Suite Italienne for cello and piano is an arrangement of several movements from his ballet Pulcinella (1919 - 1920). In Pulcinella, Stravinsky had taken works by the early eighteenth-century Italian composer Giambattista Pergolesi and effectively rewritten them by cutting, altering, and transforming the music into his own style. The result was, in Stravinsky's words, "the epiphany through which the whole of my late work became possible." Pulcinella was, in other words, Stravinsky's first work in which style in and of itself was the primary compositional determinant.

The Suite Italienne was not Stravinsky's first attempt to transform some of the numbers from the ballet into a work. In 1925, he wrote a Suite for violin and piano, and in 1932, Stravinsky enlisted the aid of cellist Gregor Piatigorsky to rework the earlier Suite into the Suite Italienne for cello and piano.  The charm of Pergolesi's melodies and the piquant flavor of Stravinsky's rewriting make this one of his most enjoyable works and certainly the most popular of his works for cello and piano.

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.