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Online, Friday 16th October
Two magnificent 20th-century displays of orchestral colour and mood laced with nostalgic longing for less troubled times frame a delightfully effervescent miniature symphony for strings that anticipates a return to sunnier climes.
Drawn from his one-act ballet score, Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite was written in the wake of the Great War and escapes its dark shadow by looking to centuries-old commedia dell’arte for inspiration. Joyfully celebrating the form’s playfully poised anarchy, it skips and pirouettes its way through a series of colourful incidents in music of delightfully varied attitudes and accents with pantomimic gleefulness.
Composed in his home town by the then 16-year-old Mozart, the Divertimento for Strings in D was the first of his so-called ‘Salzburg Symphonies’ although it is considerably more compact than that label suggests. Influenced by the crisp, delicate style of Corelli, whose music Mozart had encountered in his first visit to Italy and relished the prospect of returning to, it’s a work of enchanting sophistication that sets off with a sprightly pace, pauses for a moment of graceful reflection, and ends with a fizzing display of massed strings in exultantly playful mood.
Prokofiev described his First Symphony as ‘happy and uncomplicated music’. Casting an admiring glance back towards the Classical era, hence its nickname, it pays fresh, witty homage to the spirited, life-enhancing music of Mozart and Haydn. But this is no mere pastiche. Instead, the past is filtered through Prokofiev’s recognisably contemporary voice and the result is an affectionate tribute to a more refined age that sounds all the more remarkable for its forward-looking treatment of traditional forms.
