Childhood impressions and early familiarity with symphony music (“My uncle’s orchestra was a source of the most lively delight for me,” wrote Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka in his Notes) for many years predetermined the future composer’s interest in instrumental music. The eighteen-year-old composer made his first and as yet still timid attempts in the symphony genre with the sketches for his Symphony in B Flat Major (1822–1826). Apropos, already here one may discern the roots of Glinka’s aesthetics (two folk songs form the basis of the sonata allegro: the Russian dance In the Field and the Ukrainian Hrytsiu, Don’t Go).
Ten years later in Berlin, while studying composition under his favourite teacher Siegfried Dehn, Glinka conceived the Symphony Overture on a round-dance Russian theme. And once again – as in his childhood symphony and as in his yet-to-be-written brilliant Kamarinskaya – the idea is based on the contrast between two folk themes: slow and drawn out on the one hand and lively and dance-like on the other (“We have either frenzied merriment or bitter tears,” Glinka wrote in his Notes). The unfinished one-movement composition (in the inscription it is called a Symphony for Orchestra on Two Russian Themes) was completed and edited one century later by Vissarion Yakovlevich Shebalin and was first performed in Moscow in 1938.
The Old Music of Russian Provincial Circuses
This work (essentially the Third Piano Concerto) was written in 1989 having been commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to mark one century since its creation. It was first performed by the orchestra that commissioned it under the baton of Lorin Maazel in Chicago on 25 October 1990.
“My Circus is aimed directly at the audience, the public, the brilliance of the instrumentalist, for the joy of harmonious virtuoso ensemble playing,” the composer announced for the recording of this work on CD. “Your ear, my dear listener, will be able, I hope, to make out the approach of a circus carnival, the fanfares of invitations, the solo variations, let us say of a tightrope-walker and a juggler and then the almost ballet-like Grand Adagio and the subsequent Coda with its parade-allez “of the entire cast” in my musical storytelling. And, lastly, the fanfares once more and the circus procession’s departure from the city.”
| | The outstanding music critic and the composer’s friend Herman Laroche wrote of Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Second Symphony following the premiere: “It is a work that stands at European heights… For a long time I have not come across a work with such a powerful and thematic development of ideas, with such motivated and artistically considered contrasts.” Tchaikovsky composed much of the symphony in sketch form in Ukraine in the summer of 1872; the stamp of the national Ukrainian colour is so evident in the music of the symphony that contemporaries named it The Little Russian.
The slow introduction to the symphony is based on a Ukrainian version of the famous Russian song Down the Mother Volga River. The sonata allegro, constructed according to classical examples, concludes with a coda in which the theme of the introduction again comes to live in an expressive solo by the French horn. The symphony’s second movement is “instrumental theatre”, something quite common for Tchaikovsky. The outer sections, consistent in march-like movement, were borrowed by the composer from his early opera Ondine (after Zhukovsky) which he destroyed – there it accompanied the wedding procession, while the songful middle section is based on an amended melody from the Russian folk song Keep on Spinning, My Spinner. The impetuously rushing scherzo is yet another theatrical action, this time full of Herculean daring, mighty revelry and merry carnival laughter in the “amusing” scenes. In the finale, composed in sonata form, the dance-like nature of the Ukrainian song The Crane emerges brilliantly – from the short and extremely pompous introduction through a chain of dazzling and diverse variations to the powerful and exultant coda that sounds like a magnificent hymn.
The premiere of the symphony took place to tremendous acclaim in Moscow on 26 January 1873 under the baton of Nikolai Rubinstein.
Iosif Raiskin |
