Pièces pittoresques [SEP] instrumentation
Pièces pittoresques
Pièces pittoresques ("Picturesque pieces") are a set of ten pieces for piano by Emmanuel Chabrier. Four of the set were later orchestrated by the composer to make his Suite pastorale""'.
Background.
In 1880, while on a convalescent holiday at the coastal resort of Saint-Pair (near Granville), Chabrier composed what were to be called "Pièces pittoresques".
Both Alfred Cortot (in "La musique française de piano", PUF, 1932) and Francis Poulenc
and "Mauresque" in the "Pièces pittoresques" explored new sound-worlds of which Debussy made effective use 30 years later. Lesure finds traces of Gounod and Massenet in some of Debussy's early songs, and remarks that it may have been from the Russians – Tchaikovsky, Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin and Mussorgsky – that Debussy acquired his taste for "ancient and oriental modes and for vivid colorations, and a certain disdain for academic rules". Lesure also considers that Mussorgsky's opera "Boris Godunov" directly