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The symphonic fantaisie Kamarinskaya was written by Mikhail Glinka in 1848. It was composed in Warsaw, between two trips that Glinka made abroad (the first in 1845 to Spain and the second in 1852 to France).
The work is based on two genuine folk themes: the lyrical wedding song From beyond the Mountains, the High Mountains and the lively Kamarinskaya dance itself. In this fantaisie, Glinka established a new kind of symphony music and laid the foundations of its subsequent development, skilfully creating an unusual and bold combination of various rhythms, characters and moods. “The entire Russian symphony school, as an oak grows from an acorn, has its roots in the symphonic fantaisie Kamarinskaya, Tchaikovsky wrote of the work.
In the capricious development and the combination of two apparently dissimilar and characteristically different themes, Glinka finds common features of intonation, based on which these themes are combined in the one work. Without using typical Western European musical techniques (motif development with the subdivision of the theme, sequence and modulation), Glinka attains an uninterrupted flow and purposefulness of movement. Through the undertone variations and the intonation transformation of contrasting themes he beings them to rapprochement and unity.
Bringing Tolstoy’s novel to life on the stage through choreography – an idea that was bold to the point of audacity – can hardly be judged purely on the basis of the carefully considered and planned stage plan for the production. Shchedrin’s Anna Karenina is rather a musical concept created on the basis of motifs from the great novel. What the composer heard from the text of the book and succeeded in conveying through his musical plastique is, from first to last, a ballet “from Anna”. Shchedrin looks at the world through the eyes of the protagonist and sees and experiences all of the events as if in the first person. The musical and choreographic line drawn by Anna is the most important thing in the ballet, and everything else is merely a background against which the plot of the ballet unfolds. The composer succeeded in resisting the danger of oversimplifying the image of the heroine and created an extremely complex character that cedes almost nothing to the original.
Shchedrin created the ballet Anna Karenina in 1971.The premiere took place at the Bolshoi Theatre. The first performer of the title role was Maya Plisetskaya. Somewhat later, in 1979, the composer reworked the music of the ballet into a symphonic poem to be performed in concert and called it Romantic Music. In this work, which is divided into sections like the chapters of the book, Anna’s fate is depicted through music – from the very beginning to the tragic finale.
Pavel Velikanov
“I can say with confidence that this is my greatest work.”
Always extremely sincere in his music, Tchaikovsky composed his Fourth Symphony at one of the most critical periods of his life, after which he was left with “general recollections of passion, the terror of sensations I have felt.” Impressions of his disastrous marriage and hasty divorce came to form a feeling of general disappointment and lack of self-confidence in the composer’s mind. The acuteness of his personal sufferings made the composition of the symphony an incredibly difficult process which required almost a year of intense work (in comparison, Tchaikovsky wrote the opera The Queen of Spades in just forty-four days). As a result, a work emerged where the eternal problem of mankind – the uneven battle of the individual against external circumstances that are indifferent to his wishes and needs – was portrayed with hitherto unknown power. In the symphony’s introduction, during the threatening theme of Fate, Tchaikovsky presents the circumstances in such a way that it becomes clear that victory is impossible for friendless human volition, “there is no landing-stage … sail over this sea until grasps you and drags you to its depths.” The musical development of the first movement reflects the succession of natural psychological reactions at the recognition of the inevitability of Fate: anguish, confusion leading to despair and, lastly, the attempt to forget oneself, to leave one’s problems behind in a world of serene illusions. The increasing distance from conflict can be sensed in the development of the subsequent movements of the symphonic cycle which led Taneyev to make the association with “a symphonic poem to which three movements were joined by chance and thus created the symphony.” If traces of the composer’s subjective emotions can be felt in the second movement, then the genre images of the scherzo and the finale may in no sense be likened to attempts to struggle against Fate, as for Tchaikovsky the futility of such endeavours had been evident from the very start.
Marina Iovleva
Sergei Prokofiev worked on his First Violin Concerto in parallel with his work on the Classical Symphon. The first sketches date back to 1915, when Prokofiev planned to compose a violin concerto, but two years later the initial plan for a chamber work had expanded to the scale of a violin concerto.
Prokofiev wrote the concerto in D Major – following the tonality of concerti by Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky. However, Prokofiev’s concerto is like none of these other works. The correlation of the tempi in it has been altered: in Prokofiev’s concerto two slow sections framed a fast one. The solo violin part is extremely virtuoso in character, new in the forms of exposition and the structure. The dynamism of the development in the concerto forced the composer to abandon the composition of any traditional virtuoso cadenzas.
The concerto is dominated by lyrical images that are broken by toccata development in the first section and the “infernal nature” of the middle section. The planned performance of the Concerto for autumn 1917 by Paul Kochanski did not take place. Prokofiev’s music became more widely known six years later when the renowned Hungarian violinist József Szigeti performed it at concert halls throughout Europe and America.
Pavel Velikanov
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