Pétrouchka has remained one of Stravinsky’s most popular scores, and the source of its success is no mystery. It is a ballet about three puppets at a Russian Shrovetide carnival, actually began life as a sort of piano concerto. In the summer of 1910, shortly after the successful premiere of The Firebird, Stravinsky started work on a ballet about a pagan ritual sacrifice in ancient Russia. But he set the manuscript to The Rite of Spring aside when he was consumed by a new idea: “I had in my mind a distinct picture of a puppet, suddenly endowed with life, exasperating the patience of the orchestra with diabolical cascades of arpeggi. The orchestra in turn retaliates with menacing trumpet-blasts. The outcome is a terrific noise which reaches its climax and ends in the sorrowful and querulous collapse of the poor puppet.”

When impresario Serge Diaghilev visited Stravinsky that summer in Switzerland to see how the pagan-sacrifice ballet was progressing, he was at first horrified to learn that Stravinsky was doing nothing with it. But when Stravinsky played some of his new music, Diaghilev was charmed and saw possibilities for a ballet. With Alexander Benois, they created a storyline around the Russian puppet theater, specifically the tale of Pétrouchka, “the immortal and unhappy hero of every fair in all countries.” Stravinsky composed the score to what was now a ballet between August 1910 and May 1911, and Pétrouchka was first performed in Paris in 1911, with Nijinsky in the title role.

Stravinsky published Pétrouchka the year after the premiere, but in 1947 he revised the score. These revisions had several purposes: to reduce the size of the orchestra, to simplify some of the metric complexities, and to give greater importance to the piano, which had been the music’s original inspiration but had faded from view in the ballet version. Each version has its proponents, some preferring the greater clarity of the revision, others the opulence of the original. At this concert, Stravinsky’s revised 1947 score is performed.

—Program Note by Eric Bromberger

Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake is such a favorite of audiences around the world that it comes as a surprise to learn that the ballet was an abject failure at its premiere. Tchaikovsky, then a young composition teacher at the Moscow Conservatory, had been commissioned by the Imperial Theaters to write music for a production of this new ballet at the Bolshoi, and he worked on the score from August 1875 until April 1876. The first performance on March 4, 1877 was a disaster: It had poor scenery, costumes, and dancing, and—worst of all—it had a conductor so alarmed by Tchaikovsky’s striking music that he cut large sections of it, substituting “safe” music by other composers in their place.

The reviews were scathing, one critic declaring: “I must say that I have never seen a poorer presentation on the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre. The costumes, decor and machines did not hide in the least the emptiness of the dances.” The same critic conceded that the music showed “the hand of the true master,” but that did Tchaikovsky little good: He never heard the music again and died believing that it would always be a failure. Ironically, it was a revival in January 1895, only 14 months after his death, that launched Swan Lake on its way to the acclaim it enjoys today. Tchaikovsky never arranged the music from Swan Lake into orchestral suites, and so conductors are free to make their own selections as Maestro Figueroa has done for this weekend’s performance!