Bloomsbury Festival: Nostalgia and Youth with Goodensemble

A night featuring two neoclassical works from Russia – Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite and Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony – and Chopin’s youthful Piano Concerto No 1. The programme shares a common theme of youth and nostalgia. Both Stravinsky and Prokofiev reworked music from their predecessors: Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite is a discovery of the past, an epiphany, and a look in the mirror that marked his so-called neoclassical phase. Likewise, Prokofiev’s work is composed in a style based on that of Haydn and Mozart, but added with twists and surprises typical of Prokofiev’s writing. Chopin’s youthful concerto, in a slightly different vein aesthetically, models itself upon the concerto style by his predecessors and brings the genre to the next level with its brilliant, virtuosic, richly ornamented, yet never trivial pianism.