Islamey, oriental fantasy

Balakirev, who was considered an excellent pianist, couldn’t play Islamey. Its first performance was given by Nikolay Rubinstein -“poor wretched fellow that I am” - in St Petersburg in 1869 and for decades after that it had a reputation not only as one of the most imaginative works written for the piano but also one of the most difficult. Liszt admired it so much that he awarded it a regular place in his repertoire and he got his pupils to learn it too. Ravel was so impressed that he deliberately set out to write something even more difficult in the Scarbo movement of his Gaspard de la nuit.

Actually, Ravel had long been interested in Balakirev’s music but not so much for its virtuoso pianism as for its exotic qualities, which were a revelation and an inspiration to him when he discovered the Russian “mighty handful” in his student days. Islamey is rich in exotic rhythm and melody. The first two themes of the opening B-flat-minor Allegro agitato derive from Kabardian folk dances Balakirev had heard and noted on visits to the Caucasus in the early 1860s. Both of them but particularly the first (known locally as “Islamey”) depend for their exhilarating effect in their piano translation on the rapid repeated notes which are only the first of the many difficulties the pianist encounters in the work.

There is a respite when the tempo slows to Andante espressivo for the D major middle section and the introduction of a dreamy Tartar melody Balakirev first heard when an Armenian actor sang it at a gathering in Tchaikovsky’s home in 1869. The calm does not last long however. Unexpectedly, and with astonishing technical skill on the composer’s part, the Tartar melody is not so much integrated into a reprise of the Allegro agitato material as transformed to become part of it, to take on its rhythmic impetus and, in a final variant of massive dynamic proportions and exceptional difficulty, to radiate even more energy than its companions.