Two symphonic poems

The Enchanted Lake, Op.62

Kikimora, Op.63

Lyadov’s problem was not lack of talent or lack of technique but lack of application. He is probably better known for what he failed to do than what he actually did: Lyadov was the unfortunate composer who, commissioned to provide The Firebird score for the Ballets Russes Paris season in 1910, had got no further than buying the music paper when Diaghilev despaired of him and turned to the young and eager Igor Stravinsky instead. Not long before that, however, he had managed to complete the three short but perfectly formed orchestral pieces on which his reputation now rests, Baba-Yaga, The Enchanted Lake and Kikimora (the last two of them written originally for an opera called Zoryushka which, characteristically, he never finished).

When The Enchanted Lake was first performed in St Petersburg in 1909 the audience had surely never heard anything like it before - not from a Russian composer anyway. Tone poems based on folk legend like Baba-Yaga and Kikimora were common enough but impressionism, which is the only way to categorise The Enchanted Lake, was an essentially alien concept. You can detect all kinds of influences in it - Lyadov’s teacher Rimsky-Korsakov and Scriabin among the Russians, Wagner and perhaps even Mahler among the Germans, more Dukas than Debussy among the French - but it is no less original for that. Inspired by a lake in the composer’s favourite forest, it is pure atmosphere; it is harmony and orchestral colour liberated from thematic and structural priorities and spontaneously applied.

This “fairy-tale scene,” as Lyadov called it, is set in the nocturnal stillness of the dark rumbling that is just perceptible in the lower strings in the opening bars and that persists, in one way or another, throughout the piece. There are a few thematic events, like the poetic melody that emerges at a fairly early stage on the oboe, the fragmentary ideas offered by clarinet and flute later on, the discreetly expressive climax when the violins take up the oboe theme, the yearning line on divided cellos and violas near the end. But it is more a matter of sensation - of eerily shivering strings offset by harp chords, of gently rustling violin ostinatos, of rising gusts of chromatic figuration on violas that blow aside the harmonic mist to reveal bright reflections of light on celesta and flute in octaves and, after the brief climax, the gradual restoration of the initial but now moonlit stillness.

Kikimora is one of the many supernatural beings of Russian folklore. Ill-disposed towards humanity - but not as dangerous as the man-eating witch Baba-Yaga, the subject of Lyadov’s first symphonic poem - she is so small that her head is only as big as a thimble and her body as slender as a piece of straw. Even so, it takes seven years for her to reach her full size, during which time she is rocked in a crystal cradle and entertained by a wise old cat telling her strange fairy stories. When she is grown up she makes a lot of noise during the day and spins at night, thinking up ways of harming human beings.

Lyadov’s symphonic poem is in two equal parts, an Adagio devoted to Kikimora’s childhood in the high mountains and a brilliantly sustained Presto inspired by the non-stop activity of her malevolent maturity. Beginning quietly but ominously on muted cellos and basses, the Adagio features the cat, telling its stories to a lovely fragment of Russian folk melody on cor anglais, the young Kikimora herself, her cry floating on high woodwind as though on a gust of cold air, and her crystal cradle on celesta. Although there is an abundance of melodic ideas in the Presto section, some of them actually more lyrical than grotesque, that high woodwind cry and its several variants drive the piece to its violent climax and its magically delicate ending.

Gerald Larner ©2004

Baba Yaga, Op.56

Kikimora, Op.63

Lyadov’s problem was not lack of talent or lack of technique but lack of application. He is probably better known for what he failed to do than what he actually did: Lyadov was the unfortunate composer who, commissioned to provide The Firebird score for the Ballets Russes season in Paris in 1910, had got no further than buying the music paper when Diaghilev despaired of him and turned to the young and eager Igor Stravinsky instead. Before that, however, he did manage to complete the three short but perfectly formed orchestral pieces - Baba Yaga, The Enchanted Lake and Kikimora - on which his slender reputation now rests.

The earliest and much the shortest of the three - it is less than four minutes long - Baba Yaga was inspired by the same man-eating witch of Russian legend as Rimsky-Korsakov’s Skazka and The Hut on Chicken’s Legs in Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Although Lyadov described the piece as a “symphonic poem,” as though it had a story to tell, it is actually an evocation of just one aspect of the legend, the witch’s grotesque way of flight by means of a magic pestle and mortar. The following extract from Alexander Afanasiev’s Russian Folk Tales stands at the head of the score: "…Stealing out on another of her jaunts, Baba Yaga, the forest witch utters the customary whistle to bring mortar, pestle and broomstick scurrying to the scene. Through the forest she glides seated in the mortar, using the pestle to drive her swiftly on her way, the broom to smooth out all traces left behind by her unusual conveyance. The cracking of trees accompanies the rustle of dry leaves littering the ground. Soon the whole forest is alive with sound.…”

Summoned by a shrill whistle on high woodwind, a solo bassoon is joined in turn by a bass clarinet and a cor anglais - the three instruments presumably representing the mortar, the pestle and the broomstick - in introducing the weirdly articulated main theme. All kinds of variants and fragments of that theme, which never appears again in its original form, are then driven on a relentless rhythm and in an unchanging tempo through a fantastically coloured thicket of constantly shifting orchestral textures. The ending, as Baba Yaga and her flying machine disappear out of earshot, is as delicately elusive as the beginning was strident. The occasional echo of Dukas (Sorcerer’s Apprentice), Wagner (Walküre) or Tchaikovsky (Nutcracker) does not seriously detract from the extraordinary originality of a piece remarkable above all for the apparently reckless spontaneity of its construction. It success on its first performance in St Petersburg in 1904 was out of all proportion to its length.

Kikimora is another of the many supernatural beings of Russian folklore. Ill-disposed towards humanity but not as dangerous as Baba-Yaga, she is so small that her head is only as big as a thimble and her body as slender as a piece of straw. Even so, it takes seven years for her to reach her full size, during which time she is rocked in a crystal cradle and entertained by a wise old cat telling her strange fairy stories. When she is grown up she makes a lot of noise during the day and spins at night, thinking up ways of harming ordinary people.

The symphonic poem Kikimora is in two equal parts, an Adagio devoted to Kikimora’s childhood in the high mountains and a brilliantly sustained Presto inspired by the non-stop activity of her malevolent maturity. Beginning quietly but ominously on muted cellos and basses, the Adagio features the cat, telling its stories to a lovely fragment of Russian folk melody on cor anglais, the young Kikimora herself, her cry floating on high woodwind as though on a gust of cold air, and her crystal cradle on celesta. Although there is an abundance of melodic ideas in the Presto section, some of them actually more lyrical than grotesque, that high woodwind cry and its several variants drive the piece to its violent climax and its magically delicate ending.