The Sleeping Beauty: Bluebird Pas de deux

arranged by Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)

Adagio - Variation I - Variation II - Coda

Unlike Ravel’s arrangements of other composers’ music, Stravinsky’s tend to be more like reworkings in his own image. This is not quite the case, however, with his version of the Bluebird Pas de deux from the third act of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty. If it sometimes sounds more like Stravinsky than Tchaikovsky it is partly because of the war-time conditions in which it was written. Commissioned in 1941 by the Ballet Theatre of New York to rescore these four short movements for a small orchestra including piano - which itself would have meant a significant modification of the large-scale original - Stravinsky found that Tchaikovsky’s orchestral score was not available in New York at the time. So, working from the piano score, he created a modest new sound - one he liked so much that he used the same instrumentation in his next work, the Danses concertantes.