The Italian composer Pietro Locatelli (1695-1764) came of age in a fruitful time and place for the violin, when Stradivari was crafting incomparable instruments in nearby Cremona, and when local stars like Torelli and Vivaldi were pushing the limits of virtuosic expression. Locatelli traveled widely as a performer until 1729, when he settled in Amsterdam. That hub of commerce had become an early hotspot for music publishing, and Locatelli capitalized on the growing market for sheet music. Extracting and arranging sections from several of the twelve violin sonatas that Locatelli published as his Opus 6 in 1737, the nineteenth-century cellist Alfredo Piatti assembled this three-movement Cello Sonata in D Major. Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) secured his lasting fame with the three scores he composed for the Ballets Russes before World War I, culmating with shocking ritualism of The Rite of Spring. Stravinsky’s next work to be presented by that renegade dance troupe marked a startling change of direction: Pulcinella, staged in 1920 with sets and costumes by Picasso, was a witty pastiche of recomposed Italian Baroque music paying homage to the masked theatrics of Commedia dell’arte. The impresario Serge Diaghilev thought that the old scores he had found in Naples were the work of Pergolesi, but it turns out that the source material came from other, lesser composers. Stravinsky collaborated with a fellow Russian expatriate, the cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, to arrange selections from the ballet into this Suite Italienne for cello and piano, providing another forum for this seminal example of neoclassical music. With the runaway success of the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District in 1934, the 28-year-old Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) claimed his place as the leading voice in Soviet music. That same year, he composed the Cello Sonata in D Minor, supporting his aim of revitalizing abstract chamber music in Russia—the antithesis of politically driven “Soviet Realism.” The Cello Sonata embraces the Classical ideals of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, starting with a clear and transparent use of sonata-allegro form with its opposing key centers and contrasting themes. The fast second movement functions as the work’s scherzo, barreling along in a rowdy triplet pulse with plentiful humor and whimsy. This energetic romp clears the air for the slow and austere Largo, which rises from a plaintive, unaccompanied phrase from the cello. The fast finale rounds out the sonata with tongue-in-cheek music that parodies a “proper” Classical rondo.