CD, стоящие на полке рядом : Classics (Guru)      

## 4-9 "Suite Italienne, for violin & piano (after Pulcinella, transcribed with Samuel Dushkin)"

Stravinsky's Suite italienne for violin and piano is an arrangement of several movements from his Pergolesi 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 for violin and piano. In 1925, he wrote a Suite for violin and piano, after themes, fragments, and pieces by Giambattista Pergolesi. In 1932, Stravinsky enlisted the aid of cellist Gregor Piatigorsky 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. In this version, the order of movements is "Introductione," "Serenata," "Tarantella," "Gavotta con due variazioni," "Scherzino," and "Minuetto e finale."

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.

-James Leonard

## 12-13 "Suite Populaire Espagnole, for violin & piano (arr. from "Popular Spanish Songs" by Kochanski)"

Just before Manuel de Falla left Paris to return to Spain in 1914, he completed his harmonizations of Siete canciones populares espanoles for voice and piano using natural overtones to accompany the melody notes rather than traditional modal scales. Violinist Paul Kochanski (1887-1934) worked with Falla to transcribe six of the songs for violin and piano, leaving out the Seguidilla murciana. Since then, the songs have become the most famous of any of Kochanski's transcriptions, and many transcriptions for other instruments also have been made of the songs (including the Seguidilla). Kochanski's work was entitled Suite populaire espagnole, and that same title has been used for most of the other arrangements as well. The ordering of the songs in Kochanski's arrangement did not follow Falla's original score, but many performers prefer to restore Falla's numbering. Kochanski's suite begins with El pano moruno (The Moorish Cloth), to which Kochanski added pizzicato figures. The next songs, Nana (a lullaby) and Cancion, are both based on popular published tunes. Jota is Falla's own work in the style of folk dance music from Aragon; for this song Kochanski uses pizzicato chords as if to imitate castanets. The most famous of the songs by far is Asturiana, a lament from northern Spain, played on muted strings. The final Polo is again an original Falla piece in the style of a folk dance, sometimes described as gypsy- or flamenco-like.

-Patsy Morita