Masquerade

Khachaturian’s Masquerade music was written not for a ballet but as incidental music for a production of Lermontov’s play of that name at the Vakhtangov Theater 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.