Paul Sacher Archive

STRAVINSKY: Pulcinella Suite; Apollon musagète; Concerto in D for String Orchestra ‒ Orch. de Ch. de Lausanne/ Joshua Wellerstein ‒ MD&G

by Audiophile Audition | Sep 29, 2016 | SACD & Other Hi-Res Reviews

STRAVINSKY: Pulcinella Suite; Apollon musagète; Concerto in D for String Orchestra ‒ Orch. de Chambre de Lausanne/ Joshua Wellerstein ‒ Musikproduktion Dabringhaus und Grimm, multichannel SACD MDG 940 1955-6 (2+2+2); 65:36 (6/3/2016) ***: Stress-free Stravinsky. A musical sedative, anyone? Sometime during the First World War, while Stravinsky was riding out the storm in Switzerland, he decided that the huge orchestras that European composers, including himself, had written for before the war were passé. In the post-Apocalyptic world of the late teens and twenties, there just wouldn’t be resources available to fire up again the grand late-Romantic symphony orchestra. So Stravinsky commenced to write a string of works for more modest performing forces, starting with L’histoire du soldat and continuing with, among others, the first two pieces on the current disc, aptly played by a chamber orchestra. Like Handel, Stravinsky was a notorious borrower of other composers’ good musical ideas, and he was forthright about the practice. “Lesser artists borrow; great artists steal,” he was supposed to have said. So we have Pulcinella (1922), a ballet in the style of the commedia dell’arte and based on music attributed (mostly incorrectly) to Baroque composer Giovanni Pergolesi. To be fair, Stravinsky at first […]