Stravinsky’s joyous & psychedelically colourful transcription of 3 Movements from Petrushka. I’d heard some of Stravinsky’s other piano music before I got around to this, & didn’t get the impression he was a terribly good composer for the instrument – but by the time I finished with this, I was like: Yeah, alright, he’s a genius at this too. Just think of the number of textures here that you find basically nowhere else – the rapidfire planing chords at the beginning of the Russian Dance (weird to use the term planing, since the technique is used in such a drastically different way from Debussy), the bassoon line that peeps out from the middle of the texture at 0:55, the muted chordal tremolos at the beginning of The Shovetide Fair, the shy oboe at 8:44, the exuberant canon over the E pedal at 14:01, & all those wild passages of bright, obsessively folkish counterpoint (the 5 main melodies in The Shovetide Fair are derived from Russian folk songs, it turns out). And’s it’s not just about these moments – the whole piece just reverberates with such an unusual & compelling style – percussive & anti-lyrical yet intensely melodic, with long passages constructed from the repetition of tiny motivic cells. Plus there’s the lovely harmony too – from the lydian/dorian colour at the beginning (which then slips right to the opposite end of the dark/bright spectrum by deploying the Locrian #2 at 0:20 – the E seems tonicized in the RH, but there’s also that Bb in the LH), the dirty chords punctuating the end of the Russian Dance, the ecstatic 7th chords at 9:13 (when the violins let the melody loose), the tritone-ized folk tune at 9:50 – all great stuff.
