Prokofiev — Villa-Lobos — Poulenc

On Prokofiev=Villa-Lobos=Poulenc, Conductor Simone Menezes and the ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien trace neoclassicism’s twentieth-century journey back to its Viennese source, pairing three works born from the same historical impulse but written an ocean apart. Prokofiev’s “Classical” Symphony (1917) imagines what Haydn might have written had he lived into the modern era — precise, transparent, laced with rhythmic sleight-of-hand and sly irony. Composed the same year, entirely without contact between the two composers, Villa-Lobos’s Sinfonietta No. 1 pays a freer, more intuitive homage to Mozart, its main theme drawn from the Le nozze di Figaro overture but inverted, as if seen in a mirror, and colored by the denser, more enveloping textures that would later define his neo-Baroque, Bach-inspired writing. Poulenc’s 1947 Sinfonietta closes the program as neoclassicism fully absorbed — a work of abrupt contrasts and superimposed ideas that, in Menezes’s words, “transcends its apparent lightness” to approach symphonic scale through accumulation rather than development. Recorded at the ORF Funkhaus in Vienna, the city where this classical sensibility was born, the album asks how these works sound when reconnected to their Viennese roots — bringing depth, edge, and brilliance to a shared lineage that runs from Haydn and Mozart through Russia, Brazil, and France and back again. ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien Simone Menezes, Conductor