“Burattino and the Golden Key”: Orchestral Suite No. 4, op. 55d

Program notes

About the Work

In 1954-1955, Weinberg composed a children’s ballet based on Alexei Tolstoy’s The Golden Key, a Russian retelling of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio story in which the wooden puppet Burattino discovers a magical key that opens the door to a hidden world. Weinberg revised the ballet in 1961, and in 1964 he arranged its music into four orchestral concert suites, designated Op. 55a through Op. 55d. The Fourth Suite, heard tonight, brings together some of the most charming and theatrical numbers from the score.

The music conjures a world of marionettes, mischief, and wonder. Weinberg’s orchestral imagination is dazzling: woodwinds chatter and squeak like wooden dolls coming to life; the percussion clatters with the wit of a circus pit band; sudden lyrical interludes reveal the puppet’s tender side. The influence of Shostakovich is audible in the same biting wit and the same ironic juxtapositions of the grotesque and the tender, but Weinberg’s voice is entirely his own: warmer, gentler, with a melodic generosity rooted in Eastern European folk and Yiddish song.

Listen for the nimble dance episodes, the mocking music associated with the villainous Karabas-Barabas (a sinister puppet-master), and the radiant lyrical pages that hint at the world beyond the magic door. This is music with the surface of a children’s tale and the soul of a survivor: playful, but never naive.