Sabre Dance (Gayaneh)

Aram Khachaturian (1903 - 1978)

Sabre Dance (Gayaneh)

Adagio (Spartacus)

For an immediate infusion of irresistible energy no athlete need look further than the Sabre Dance from Gayaneh - a ballet score based, like much of Khachaturian’s music, on the folk song and dances of his native Armenia. As well as the quick rhythmic fix at the beginning, it has a an derisively aggressive trombone part and, after an apparently more friendly middle section, an even fiercer conclusion.

The Adagio from Spartacus - Khachaturian’s third ballet, written in 1956, fourteen years after Gayaneh - has nothing, as far as the composer was aware, to do with The Onedin Line, tall ships, or even the sea. It does, at its climax, have a splendid full-sail quality about it but this is the climax not of a great voyage but of an amorous scene between the freedom-fighter Spartacus and his beloved Phrygia. Set in ancient Rome and based on much the same story as Kubrick’s film, Spartacus was clearly not a subject suitable for Khachaturian’s Armenian idiom. As this piece shows, however, he had no shortage of melodic inspiration of a different kind.