Suite No.2

Marche

Valse

Polka

Galop

Both of Stravinsky’s Suites for small orchestra were compiled from a series of eight Easy Pieces for piano duet written in Switzerland during the First World War. If its origin seems dull the music itself is very definitely not. The pieces chosen for Suite No.2, for example, are so entertaining that the composer arranged them in 1921 for a Russian cabaret in Paris called the Chauve-Souris - where they would not have been out of place had the “pitiful band” there been able to play them. The satirical opening Marche was written for the Italian musician Alfredo Casella who had heard the Polka, the earliest of the four pieces, and couldn’t believe that the composer of The Rite of Spring could produce “such a piece of popcorn,” as Stravinsky himself so modestly described it. The Marche and the following Valse, an appropriately waltz-time tribute to Erik Satie, prove that he could do it again and again. As for the popcorn Polka, it is a caricature of the impresario of the Ballets Russes, Sergei Diaghilev, seen as “a circus ring-master in evening dress and top hat, cracking his whip and urging on a rider on horse-back.” Back in Satie’s Paris, the closing Galop is another deliciously crunchy piece of popcorn.