Programme — Swan Lake, Op.20, Prelude to Act 2, Waltz — Russian Ballet

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

Swan Lake, Op.20

Prelude to Act 2

Waltz

One of the greatest of all Tchaikovsky’s melodic inspirations - which means one of the greatest ever - is the achingly wistful oboe tune first heard in Swan Lake as a flight of swans passes over Prince Siegfried’s estate. Siegfried does not know it at the time but, as he learns later, they are no ordinary swans: they are a group of maidens condemned by an evil spell on their leader Odette to appear as swans during the day and as humans only at night. The Prelude to Act 2 of the ballet takes up the oboe theme again as they return to their lake in the moonlight - just before they resume the shape of the beautiful maidens they really are and Siegfried falls in love with the beautiful Odette. The Waltz is taken from an entertainment put on for Siegfried’s birthday celebrations in Act 1. Actually a sequence of four waltz-time tunes and a coda, it is one of the best developed and one of the most attractive of all Tchaikovsky’s pieces in his favourite dance form.

Although its popularity is now firmly established, Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake was not a great success when it was first seen at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow in 1877. The problem was not the score - which, as Tchaikovsky modestly remarked, “contains some quite decent numbers” - but a performance so bad as to have been described by one observer as “shabby.”

Aram Khachaturian (1903 - 1978)

Spartacus - Adagio

Gayane - Dance of the Young Maidens

Khachaturian’s ballet Spartacus is based on the same episode in Roman history as Stanley Kubrick’s famous film of the same name. Written in 1956, decades before the BBC TV Onedin Line series, it has nothing at all to do with tall ships or the even the sea. At its climax, however, the highly melodious Adagio does 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.

Like much of Khachaturian’s music, the score of his previous ballet Gayaneh is based for the most part on the songs and dances of his native Armenia. The story behind it is so unimportant that, twenty five years after its first performance in 1942, Khachaturian completely changed the scenario while leaving much of the music just as it was before. What is important is the immense vitality and exotic colouring of the dances. By no means all of it is as violent, however, as the famous Sabre Dance. The Dance of the Young Maidens, for example, is not only tuneful but also quite charming - until, that is, the intrusion of a peculiarly vicious dissonance and an assertive recall of the main theme towards the end.

Tchaikovsky

Eugene Onegin - Polonaise

Although Eugene Onegin is not a ballet but an unusually intimate opera, it does include two important ball scenes - one of them Tatyana’s birthday party in her home in the country, the other a grand affair set in aristocratic St Petersburg, to which milieu Tatyana has now graduated by means of a socially favourable marriage. The tone of the high-society event is set by its opening number, a brilliant and extended Polonaise introduced by trumpet fanfares and characterised by its proudly strutting rhythms. A quieter and rather more expressive middle section usefully offsets the ceremonial festivity around it.

Tchaikovsky

Andante cantabile for cello and string orchestra

Written in 1871, seven years before Eugene Onegin and five years before Swan Lake, Tchaikovsky’s First String Quartet was one of his earliest successes. The second movement, headed Andante cantabile, proved to be a particular favourite. It still is, not least because of the quality of the melody with which it begins, a Ukranian folk song Tchaikovsky collected on his sister’s estate at Kamenka. The contrasting material is not without its attractions either. The piece exists in all kinds of arrangements but there is only one by Tchaikovsky himself, a highly effective version for solo cello and string orchestra.

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1871)

The Firebird

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 through its tunes. It is about the evil King Kaschei who - in spite of his supernatural powers but with the help of the magic Firebird - is finally defeated by the heroic Prince Ivan. On the musical level, it is about themes of exotic malignancy finally displaced by wholesome romantic melody.

The Infernal Dance represents King Kaschei at his most dangerous. It is a virulent study in malevolence characterised not only by its explosive dynamics and ferocious rhythmic syncopations but also by a tune that is too wild to confirm to civilised standards of harmony. Though a supernatural being like Kaschei, the Firebird is anything but malevolent, as she demonstrates in the lovely Berceuse which charms Kaschei and his followers to sleep. This leads to a final glorification of romantic melody. Russian folk song gave Stravinsky just what he wanted here - an impressively broad melody called “By the Gate” which positively thrives and flourishes under all the weight of celebration that the composer hangs on to it.

Modest Mussorgsky (1835-1881)

orchestrated by Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908)

Khovanshchina

Prelude: Dawn on Moscow River

Dances of the Persian Slave Girls

Mussorgsky started work on his opera Khovanschina in 1872 but it was far from complete and largely unorchestrated when the composer finally succombed to alcoholism nine years later. It was left to Rimsky-Korsakov, the most industrious of musical executors, to finish it off. Although his edition has been criticised for sounding more like Rimsky-Korsakov than Mussorgsky - Shostakovich completed a more idiomatic version in 1958 - it was done so promptly and so effectively that the opera was brought to performance only five years after Mussorgsky’s death.

Rimsky’s evocative scoring of the Prelude to the first act has been instrumental in making it almost as popular, in its very different way, as his version of the same composer’s A Night on the Bare Mountain. Its structure, unlike that of the opera which follows, is simplicity itself: an introduction, three statements of a theme - which must be one of the most beautiful of all Russian melodies - and a coda. Described by Mussorgsky himself as “Dawn on Moscow River,” it was intended to give the impression of early-morning smoke drifting from the chimneys, the crowing of cocks, the ringing of matins bells, and the reflection of the rising sun on the domes of the Kremlin. The musical imagery is so poetic that, no less in Rimsky’s scoring than anyone else’s, it achieves just that.

The dance element in Khovanshchina is provided by Prince Khovansky’s Persian slave girls, who are clearly a most attractive asset to his household. They begin with an exotically languorous dance accompanied first by a seductive cor anglais and then by violins. More animated material introduced by a flute invites a more vigorous response and dramatic interventions on percussion stimulate them to a frenzy. Although the intensity of their activity constantly fluctuates, and is briefly calmed by a recall of the opening cor anglais melody, the pressure towards the primitively fierce ending is irresisitble.

Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)

Romeo and Juliet

Montagues and the Capulets

The Young Juliet

Masks

Romeo and Juliet

Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet is not only the greatest ballet score by any Russian composer since Tchaikovsky but also the most inspired of all ballets on Shakespearean themes. Even so, although it was completed in 1936 and first performed in Czechoslovakia in 1938, it wasn’t seen in the Soviet Union until 1940. The Bolshoi rejected it as “undanceable” and even when it went into rehearsal at the Kirov it met with much opposition: “The music seemed to us incomprehensible and almost impossible to dance to,” recalled Galina Ulanova, “We were badly hampered by the unusual orchestration… and the frequent changes of rhythm, too, gave us a great deal of trouble.” Her Juliet was, however, to become one of the greatest triumphs of her illustrious career.

It was because of that initial opposition that Prokofiev wrote the orchestral suites which have since made Romeo and Juliet as much a work for the concert hall as for the theatre. One of the most familiar items of all is Montagues and Capulets from the ball at the house of the Capulets, where the knights dance on heavy feet, as though they still had their armour on. In a graceful middle section Juliet dances with Paris, her family’s preferred suitor. Shakespeare’s heroine, who has yet to meet Romeo at this stage, is still not fourteen, as Juliet the young girl so vividly suggest - playful on strings and woodwind, innocent on clarinet, sentimental on flute.

The first we hear of Romeo in this selection is in Masks as he and his friends make their masked entry to the Capulets’ ball - gingerly at first but with increasing, indeed bounding confidence. Romeo and Juliet, the ballet’s equivalent to Shakespeare’s balcony scene, is set in a delicate nocturnal atmosphere created by harp and muted strings. Beginning hesitantly with Romeo’s theme on solo strings and Juliet’s nervous answer on flute, the dialogue develops in intensity on an arch of ecstatic melody which finally falls back into the nocturnal stillness.

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)

The Age of Gold

Polka

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 honest 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.

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

Sleeping Beauty

Finale

Opinions differ as to which is Tchaikovsky’s greatest ballet, his first (Swan Lake), his last (Nutcracker) or Sleeping Beauty which he wrote between the two. Certainly, Charles Perrault’s fairy story delighted the composer “beyond all description” and inspired what he rightly considered to be one of his finest scores. On its first performance in St Petersburg in 1890, however, the Tsar could find nothing more enthusiastic to say about it than “Very nice!” Unless the Tsar was asleep, it was a very inadequate reaction to a ballet masterpiece. And he surely could not have slept through the rousing Finale in which the whole company celebrates the wedding of the once sleeping beauty to Prince Désiré who had awakened her with the required kiss. It takes the form of a very lively and brightly coloured mazurka including two contrasting episodes but ending on an even higher dynamic level and at an even quicker tempo than it began.