Stravinsky : Suite Italienne for cello and piano (1932) - Michal Kanka & Riccardo Caramella

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky* (1882 - 1971)

Suite Italienne for cello and piano (1932)
after ballet Pulcinella (1919 - 1920),
transcribed by the composer and Gregor Piatigorsky

Introduzione (Allegro moderato) 0:00
Serenata (Larghetto) 2:35
Aria (Allegro alla breve) 5:53
Tarantella (Vivace) 10:51
Minuetto (Moderato) e Finale (Molto vivace) 13:07

*or Strawinsky or Stravinskii; Russian: Игорь Фёдорович Стравинский

Michal Kanka, cello
Riccardo Caramella, piano
live concert, Verbania, 1990

Stravinsky's Suite italienne for violin 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 Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710 - 1736) 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 for violin and piano. In 1925, he wrote a Suite for violin and piano, after themes, fragments, and pieces by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi. In 1932, Stravinsky enlisted the aid of cellist Gregor Piatigorski to rework the earlier Suite into the Suite italienne for cello and piano. In 1932, Stravinsky and violinist Samuel Dushkin arranged the cello-and-piano Suite Italienne into the violin-and-piano Suite italienne. The charm of Pergolesi's melodies and the piquant flavor of Stravinsky's rewriting makes his Suite italienne one of his most enjoyable works and certainly the most popular of his works for violin and piano.