CBSO 2002

Ballets russes

On one level “Ballets russes” means no more than “Russian ballets.” On another level - since it was the name Sergei Diaghilev gave to the company that revolutionised both dance and music in the years just before and just after the First World War - “Ballets russes” means something colourful, exotic, magical, sexy, even scandalous. As it happens, only one item in this programme, Stravinsky’s Firebird, was actually created by Diaghilev’s Ballets russes. On the other hand, after Diaghilev had demonstrated in his Paris productions what Russian choreographers, dancers, designers and composers could do when liberated from the constraints of Imperial Russian tradition, ballet in Moscow and St Petersburg could scarcely remain the same.

Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, much the best ballet composed in the Soviet Union, would not have been written as it was without the composer’s experience of the Ballets russes. It took a shamefully long time for a Soviet company to perform Romeo and Juliet and even then neither the Kirov nor the Bolshoi could have staged it if, however indirectly, Diaghilev had not changed perceptions of ballet in those theatres. In the meantime, by way of works like Shostakovich’s Age of Gold and Khachaturian’s Gayane, Soviet ballet was developing its own style and, of course, it continued to perform the Tchaikovsky classics. But even a score as inspired as The Sleeping Beauty owes more than a little of its international reputation as the greatest of all Russian ballets to what Diaghilev’s Ballets russes did for it (as The Sleeping Princess) in Western Europe in the 1920s.

Aram Khachaturian (1903 - 1978)

Sabre Dance (from Gayane)

Adagio (from Spartacus)

Waltz (from Masquerade)

Khachaturian - whose music is distinguished by its rhythmic vitality, its exotic tunefulness and its extravagant instrumental colour - was just the sort of composer Diaghilev would have been interested in for the Ballets russes. History didn’t work out that way, however, and Khachaturian became one of the major adornments of the Soviet theatre and concert hall, not as highly regarded in the West as Prokofiev and Shostakovich but more liked by the political authorities at home and perhaps more popular with the public too.

His first major success in the theatre was his ballet Gayane which, set as it is in a Soviet Armenian village, was a subject that suited him very well: "I'll always be an Armenian,” he said, “but a European Armenian, who will make the whole of Europe, the entire world, listen to our music.” The entire world does in fact listen to the Sabre Dance which he wrote, at the request of the choreographer but very much against his will, on the day before the first performance in 1942. Short but exhilarating, it sustains its hyper-activity from its rhythmically thrilling beginning, by way of its aggressively derisive trombone interventions and an apparently friendlier middle section, to an even fiercer conclusion.

There is another sword dance in Khachaturian’s next ballet Spartacus, which is based on the same episode in Roman history as Stanley Kubrick’s famous film. The most popular number in this case is not the sword dance but, thanks to BBC TV, a highly melodious slow movement. Written in 1956, decades before The Onedin Line series, Spartacus has nothing at all to do with tall ships or the even the sea. At its climax the Adagio does, however, have a majestic full-sail quality about it, even though it is actually the climax not of a great voyage but of an amorous scene between the freedom-fighter Spartacus and his beloved Phrygia.

Khachaturian’s Masquerade music was written not for a ballet but as incidental music for a revival of Lermontov’s play of that name at the Vakhtangov Theatre in Moscow in 1941. The music required here was something in the Russian romantic style that would recall the high-society St Petersburg of the 1830s where the play is set. The brilliant Waltz - which was inspired by the leading female character’s excited chatter about a new waltz tune she has just heard - could scarcely be mistaken for anything by Lermontov’s contemporary Glinka but it clearly belongs to the same tradition as the great waltzes of Tchaikovsky.

Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)

Three dances from Romeo and Juliet, Op.64

Juliet, the young girl

Montagues and Capulets

Romeo at Juliet’s Tomb

Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet has always been a favourite item in the concert hall. That, in fact, is where its life began. Although it is now recognised as not only the greatest ballet score by any Russian composer since Tchaikovsky but also the most inspired of all ballets on Shakespearean themes, it was initially rejected by both of the leading Soviet theatres - the Kirov in 1935 and the Bolshoi in 1936. The composer’s reaction to the setback was to compile a Romeo and Juliet concert suite, which was first performed with much success in Moscow in November 1936.

The ballet still not having reached the stage by the following year, Prokofiev put together a second orchestral suite of seven dances, for Leningrad this time, and a set of ten piano pieces which he himself introduced to the Moscow audience in 1937. The strategy was effective at least in that, by a quirk of history, it led to a staging of the ballet by the Yugoslav National Ballet in Brno in Czechoslovakia in 1938. It was not seen in Russia, however, until the Kirov condescended to present it in 1940. In anticipation of a new production at the Bolsho Prokofiev produced a third orchestral suite in 1946.

All three of today’s extracts come from the second suite. Juliet the young girl presents Shakespeare’s heroine before she meets Romeo and, though not yet fourteen, is destined by her parents to marry Count Paris. She is introduced by a playful theme of runs and leaps in a movement which features also a charmingly innocent tune for clarinet and, as she expresses her reluctance to accept the hand of Paris, a slower middle section with a poignant flute melody.

With Montagues and Capulets the scene changes to the ball at the house of the Capulets, where the knights dance in aggressively heavy-footed rhythms. In a graceful middle section Juliet, who has still not met Romeo, dances with her suitor Paris to an elegant variant of the same Capulet theme, gliding with the flute on viola glissandi and turning in quietly expressive chromatic harmonies.

Romeo at Juliet’s Grave comes from near the end of the ballet, after Romeo and Juliet have been secretly married. In an effort to avoid the threat of marriage to Paris, Juliet has taken a potion which allows her to feign death - and which, after a miscalculation by Friar Laurence, is so efficacious that it convinces Romeo too. After the lamenting opening and the departure of the family mourners, Romeo enters the Capulet crypt, takes Juliet’s apparently dead body in his arms and, before killing himself, guides her through their Balcony Scene dance for one last time. The scene ends as a distant echo of the flute melody from Juliet the young girl, now floating on high violins, dies quietly away.

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)

Polka (from The Age of Gold)

Shostakovich’s ballet The Age of Gold was roundly condemned by the political authorities when it was first performed at the Kirov in Leningrad in 1930. “The image of the Soviet people in this ballet is inert and false,” they said, “and the representatives of the capitalist world are given much more play.” In fact, it had been Shostakovich’s intention to satirise capitalist values as seen through the eyes of a Soviet football team visiting Western Europe. What went wrong is that the satirical pieces are so brilliantly clever that they proved to be more attractive than the music celebrating communist political correctness. The Polka, a music-hall number from the third act, is an irresistible example - irresistible not in spite of the wrong notes but because of them.

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1871)

Three Dances from The Firebird (1945 version)

Infernal Dance

Berceuse

Finale

Stravinsky was never more successful, at least in commercial terms, than he was with the music for his very first ballet, The Firebird, which was written for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1910. The reason for the popularity of the score is not too difficult to find. Alongside its brilliantly extravagant colouring and its irresistible rhythmic interest, its great attraction is that it tells its story in terms of melody. It is about the evil King Kaschei who, in spite of his supernatural powers but with the help of the Firebird, is defeated by Prince Ivan. On the musical level, it is about malevolently exotic melody finally displaced by wholesome romantic melody.

The Infernal Dance of King Kaschei is a virulent study in malevolence characterised not only by its explosive dynamics and ferocious rhythmic syncopations but also by a melodic line distorted by the dissonant intervals Stravinsky uses to distinguish the magical from the human element in the ballet. The music associated with the Firebird is somewhere between the two. Although a supernatural being like Kaschei, the Firebird is anything but malevolent, as it demonstrates in the lovely Berceuse which charms Kaschei and his followers to sleep. This leads to the triumph of Ivan over Kaschei and the final glorification of romantic melody. Russian folk song gave Stravinsky just what he wanted here - an impressively broad tune called By the Gate, which positively thrives and flourishes under all the weight of celebration that the composer hangs on it.

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

Four movements from the Swan Lake Suite, Op.20

Scene

Dance of the Swans

Hungarian Dance (Csárdás)

Waltz

Tchaikovsky’s first ballet - using the term in its widest possible sense - was an entertainment he devised for his nieces in the domestic bliss of his sister’s home at Kamenka in 1871. Based on the same German legend as Swan Lake - which was his first ballet in the real sense of the term - it apparently contained an early version of the lovely, plaintive oboe melody which, through its association with the heroine Odette and her swan-maiden companions, brings at least an impression of symphonic unity to a score comprising literally dozens of separate numbers grouped into four eventful acts.

The musical superiority of Swan Lake did nothing, or rather less than nothing, to guarantee it popular success after its shabby first performance at the Bolshoi in 1877. If Tchaikovsky himself wasn’t immediately unhappy with the score, he confessed himself “ashamed” only a few months later when he saw Delibes’s Sylvia in Paris and declared that if he had known that ballet before - “such elegance, such a wealth of melody and rhythm, such outstanding orchestration” - he would never have written his own. Demoralising though it apparently was at the time, the French composer’s example did benefit Swan Lake in one way, however: as Tchaikovsky wrote to his publisher in 1882, “The other day I remembered my Swan Lake and would very much like to preserve the music from oblivion for it contains some quite decent numbers. So I have decided to make a suite from it in the manner of Delibes.” It is not at all likely that Tchaikovsky himself selected the six numbers eventually published by Jurgenson in 1900 but, whoever was responsible for it, the suite clearly had the desired posthumous effect.

The Swan Lake Suite begins in Act 2 with a sadly atmospheric Scene set by the lake inhabited by Odette and her swan-maiden companions who, like her, are under a spell that condemns them to appear as swans during the day and allows them to resume their human form only at night. It is based on the evocative oboe melody written at Kamenka and first heard in the ballet at the end of the preceding act as the flight of enchanted swans passes over the Prince Siegfried’s estate.

The Dance of the Swans features a group of Odette’s young companions in a curiously charming combination of cheerful rhythms and lugubrious minor harmonies. The other two dances in this selection are associated not with the swan-maidens but with Siegfried, who falls in love with Odette and finally dies for her. One five national dances performed at his birthday ball in Act 3, the Hungarian Csárdás offers an authentic combination of a slow lassú section with a characteristically fiery friss. The Waltz is taken from an entertainment put on for another of his birthday celebrations in Act 1. Actually a sequence of four waltz-time tunes and a coda, it is structurally one of the best developed and melodically one of the most attractive of all Tchaikovsky’s pieces in his favourite dance form.

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

The Sleeping Beauty: Suite, Op.66a

Introduction: allegro vivace - The Lilac Fairy: andantino

Adagio

Puss in Boots and the White Cat: allegro moderato

Panorama: andantino

Waltz: allegro

When King Florestan christened his daughter Aurora and selected her godmothers from among the fairies he, most unfortunately, failed to invite the wicked fairy Carabosse. Her revenge is to put a curse on Aurora who, she decrees, will prick herself on a sharp object, fall asleep and never wake up again. The Lilac Fairy takes pity on the Princess and, though she cannot reverse the curse entirely, moderates it so that when Aurora pricks herself and falls asleep she will be given the chance to be awakened by a handsome prince. At Aurora’s twentieth birthday party Carabosse sees to it that she does in fact prick herself on a spindle. The Princess duly falls asleep and the whole court with her. A hundred years later the Lilac Fairy leads Prince Désiré to the sleeping beauty and he awakens her with a kiss.

Charles Perrault’s fairy story The Sleeping Beauty delighted Tchaikovsky “beyond all description,” he said, and inspired what he rightly considered to be one of his greatest scores (although, on its first performance in St Petersburg in 1890, the Tsar could find nothing more enthusiastic to say about it than “Very nice!”). Much though Tchaikovsky liked the music he did not, as he was to do with The Nutcracker, make a concert suite out of it. The Suite to be performed on this occasion, as on most others, was arranged by the composer’s younger colleague Alexander Ziloti.

The Suite begins like the ballet with dramatic and clearly malevolent music associated with the evil fairy Carabosse. A change of mood, following a fierce climax and a short silence, signals the entry of the Lilac Fairy, whose benevolent nature is suggested by a lovely melody on cor anglais accompanied by harp. This particular extract is taken from the end of the first act, after Aurora has fallen asleep: by means of a powerful spell (on woodwind and brass) the Lilac Fairy puts the rest of the court to sleep and turns the royal garden into an impenetrable forest.

The “Rose” Adagio comes from earlier in the first act where Aurora’s princely suitors at her twentieth birthday party are astonished by her beauty as she presents them with roses. Introduced by a harp cadenza and based on one of the most beautiful and most expressive of all Tchaikovsky’s melodies, it is developed almost to the extent of a symphonic movement. Puss in Boots and the White Cat (visitors from another Perrault fairy tale) are comic and very distinctly feline guests at Princess Aurora’s wedding to Prince Désiré near the end of the ballet. Panorama, another lyrically expansive episode, comes from the second act where the Lilac Fairy leads Désiré to King Florestan’s castle. As for the Waltz performed as part of Aurora’s birthday celebrations in the first act, while it is not as varied as the great Waltz in Swan Lake, it is no less tuneful and no less seductive.

Gerald Larner©2002