Stravinsky’s ‘Pulcinella’ and More

“Pulcinella’ was my discovery of the past, the epiphany through which the whole of my late work became possible,” Stravinsky wrote in 1962.

“It was a backward look, of course--the first of many love affairs in that direction--but it was a look in the mirror, too.”

Stravinsky was talking about his 1920 commedia dell’arte ballet score for Diaghilev, based on music ascribed to Giambattista Pergolesi, the short-lived Neapolitan (1710-36) whose posthumous reputation was such that he was credited with 330 compositions, of which some 300 have since been proven spurious. But “Pulcinella” preceded the start of the debunking process by three decades.

The source material is, as it turns out, the work of half a dozen composers, including Pergolesi, whose portion is seven of the ballet’s 19 numbers, and an obscure contemporary of his named Domenico Gallo who provided five, including the obsessively catchy tune with which the score opens.

While Stravinsky left the inherited melodies very nearly intact, he infused them with the rhythmic dynamism that is uniquely his, while providing the delectably dry orchestration for an ensemble of 30-odd players.

The Stravinsky method of working with borrowed materials is set forth in a helpful new recording (London 425 614) in which his complete score is followed by some engaging source material: trio sonata movements by Gallo (including the opening theme) and a cello piece by Pergolesi (London 425 614).

“Pulcinella” is performed by the excellent St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, whose efforts, alas, are overshadowed by Christopher Hogwood’s humorless, unincisive direction. The trio of vocal soloists ranges from smoothly proficient (mezzo Bernadette Manca di Nissa) to adequate if hard-pressed (bass John Ostendorf) to crude (tenor David Gordon).

The program takes wing, however, with the Baroque sources, snappily projected by a small contingent of orchestra principals, led by Hogwood in his element: directing 18th-Century repertory from the harpsichord.

A wholly original example of Stravinsky-looking-back--disdaining, that is, the episodic structure, grandioseness and rhythmic fury of “Le Sacre du Printemps,” with which he had set the world on its ear in 1913 in favor of formal order and textural clarity--rounds out what should have been a dynamite program: a punchless reading by Hogwood and his Minnesotans of the 1938 “Dumbarton Oaks” Concerto, a dry-point evocation of the Baroque concerto grosso .

There is no source material as a bonus, but conductor Richard Hickox, his responsive City of London Sinfonia and a stylish vocal trio--mezzo Ann Murray, tenor Martyn Hill and bass David Thomas--do present “Pulcinella” with all its gleaming wit, charm and rowdiness intact (Virgin Classics 90767).

The added work here, superlatively done by Hickox and his instrumentalists, is backward-looking and unmistakably of its time (1942), the tough, acerbic, all-Stravinsky “Danses Concertantes.”

Note: Virgin’s annotator, unaware of half a century’s worth of Baroque scholarship (and a good deal of Stravinsky scholarship as well) ascribes all of the “Pulcinella” sources to Pergolesi. In addition, Virgin supplies neither texts nor translations of the vocal segments.

The most rigorously backward-looking--formally, texturally and rhythmically clear--of the immediate post-”Pulcinella” pieces of the 1920s are the not-too-often encountered Concerto for Piano and Winds, the “Capriccio” for the same combination and the Symphonies of Wind Instruments.

All three are presented, along with the desert-dry “Movements” (1959) for piano and a more usual orchestra of winds and strings, in dynamic, superbly detailed readings by pianist Paul Crossley and the London Sinfonietta under Esa-Pekka Salonen (Sony Classics 45797).

Stravinsky’s 1946 Concerto in D for string orchestra is a far more menacing work than one might guess from listening to the slick, sweet-toned performance by the Moscow Virtuosi under Vladimir Spivakov (RCA 60370).

The program is, nonetheless, intriguingly unhackneyed, offering in addition to the Stravinsky, Prokofiev’s delightful “Overture on Hebrew Themes”; the flashy “Capriccio” for oboe and strings of Penderecki; Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s touching 1939 “Concerto funebre,” with Spivakov himself as the silky violin soloist.

And, finally, the funny-weird “Suite in Old Style” by the Soviet Union’s current musical bad-boy in residence, Alfred Schnittke, which starts off as fake (mock?) Handel with “wrong” notes in the bass and leads us into alternating sprightly and pensive tunes that have a way either of not finishing or taking us down false paths, in the spirit of Mozart’s “Musical Joke.”