Easter Festival Overture

Rimsky-Korsakov’s three most successful orchestral works - virtually his last scores of that kind, since he concentrated on opera for the last twenty years of his life - were all written between 1887 and 1888. As the composer himself said in his autobiography, they “close a period in my career, at the end of which my orchestration had attained a considerable degree of virtuosity and warm sonority.” In spite of the qualities they have in common, however, the Easter Festival Overture differs from the Capriccio espagnol and Scheherazade in that it is inspired not by any romantically remote setting or exotic musical material but by a distinctively Russian phenomenon.

What struck the composer most about the Russian way of Easter was its mixture of profound religious sentiment and pagan celebration. “It was this legendary and pagan side of the festival,” he wrote, “this transition from the gloomy and mysterious evening of Passion Saturday to the unbridled pagan-religious rejoicing of Easter Sunday that I wanted to represent in my Overture.” So, although there is rather more to it in terms of tempo variety, the piece is divided into two main sections, a slow introduction and a much longer Allegro that becomes progressively quicker as it approaches its celebratory conclusion.

The opening Lento mistico is based on “Let God arise,” a theme the composer found in the Obikhod, a popular collection of Russian Orthodox canticles and a valuable source of material for a work of this kind. He introduces “Let God arise” on low woodwind and repeats it in alternation with ethereal violin and flute cadenzas and an expressive chant “An angel wailed.” A short Andante lugubre - the “gloomy colours of which,” the composer says, “depict the Holy Sepulchre” - is illuminated in radiant high string sounds by the “ineffable light of the Resurrection” and the quick section begins: “Let them also that Hate him flee before Him,” says the composer’s programme note at this point. The Allegro, which presents a quicker version of “Let God arise” alongside other Orthodox themes, incorporates a passage in which “the triumphant, trumpet-like cries of the archangels” mingle with a “joyful, almost dance-like peal of bells” and a short trombone recitative representing “the priests’ reading of the good tidings of the Holy Gospel.” The final climax of the Overture is based on “Let God arise” in magnificently orchestrated augmentation.