NPR has a great piece today celebrating the 100th anniversary of Stravinsky’s Petrouchka (one of the world premiere ballets that will open our 2011/2012 season).

 

Here’s a tidbit:

in Petrushka, Stravinsky’s next collaboration with Ballets Russes, the young composer begins to uncover his true voice. Writer Jeremy Noble calls it “the ability to express physical gestures and movements (and the psychological states that prompt them) in purely musical terms.” Ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein put it more succinctly, saying that Stravinsky, for the first time, “made music, not to serve the dance, but to control it….

In late summer 1910, when Diaghilev visited Stravinsky, he was working on… a concert piece for piano and orchestra. Stravinsky’s plan was to have a mischievous piano continually interrupt the orchestra, inhabiting the persona of Petrushka, the well-known character from Russian folk puppet theater.”

Read the full post from them here.

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