Stravinsky: Petroesjka / Petrouchka Orchestra Live concert

The Shrovetide Fair
Petrushka's Room
The Moor's Room
The Shrovetide Fair (Toward Evening)
Stravinsky has written of how he wished to refresh himself after the enormously succesful ballet Firebird by composing a concert piece for piano and orchestra. Piano vs. orchestra turned out to be a more accurate description, as Stravinsky eventually conceived of the piano representing a puppet endowed with life and contending with trumpet blasts and other violence from the orchestra. He titled it Petrushka after, in his words, "the immortal and unhappy hero of every fair in all countries." The pianist he imagined as some kind of clownish puppet come to life, "exasperating the patience of the orchestra with diabolical cascades of arpeggios."

Stravinsky's score for Petrushka is brilliant, charming and absorbing, one of the most magical scores in all the classical literature. Stravinsky borrowed folk tunes to illustrate the crowd scenes, used bitonal chords to signify Petrushka's dual existence as puppet and living being, wrote his own seductive melodies, and stiched it all together seamlessly with a genius for dramatization and flair for orchestration that could only come from Stravinsky.

Видео Stravinsky: Petroesjka / Petrouchka Orchestra Live concert канала Eliane Rodrigues