St Petersburg, Concert Hall

Rachmaninoff. Prokofiev. Tchaikovsky


The Mariinsky Orchestra
Conductor: Ignat Solzhenitsyn


PROGRAMME:
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Symphony No 1 in D Minor, Op. 13

Sergei Prokofiev
Suite from the ballet Romeo and Juliet

Pyotr Tchaikovsky
Romeo and Juliet fantasy overture


Vengeance is mine; I will repay
According to one contemporary, the twenty-two-year-old Sergei Rachmaninoff chose this Biblical quotation as an epigraph to his First Symphony. Today we can only guess if the young composer was thinking of a higher court – the court of time – or if he believed in the just vengeance which he would pour down on critics of his first essay in the symphony genre and, of course, all his subsequent works...
Two years following the triumphant success of the opera Aleko at the Bolshoi Theatre (Rachmaninoff presented it at his graduation exam when he completed his studies at the Moscow Conservatoire) the composer composed a symphony and anxiously awaited its first public performance. However, this only occurred two years afterwards; the premiere at the Noble Assembly in St Petersburg was conducted by Alexander Glazunov. Rachmaninoff never experienced such bitter disappointment – the symphony was a disaster: both the critics and the public gave the work an undisguisedly cold reception; at times reviews were scathing in tone. But those who complained at the unsuccessful performance of the symphony were right. Glazunov had not felt its “pulse”; the temperaments of the young Rachmaninoff and the established maestro were poles apart!
Many years later (in April 1917) Rachmaninoff wrote to Boris Asafiev about the symphony that “It was composed in 1895 and performed in 1897. It was a failure, which, however, proves nothing. Often, many good things have been failures, and many bad things have been liked even more frequently (italics added by I.R.)
... Following this symphony I composed nothing for about three years. I was like a man who had been thunderstruck and who had lost the use of his head and his hands for a long time... I will not present the symphony and in my will I will insist on performances being banned.” During the composer’s life the symphony was never performed again, the score was never printed and the original was lost.
In 1944 in the manuscript department of the Leningrad Conservatoire Library, Professor Alexander Ossovsky managed to unearth the orchestral parts, using which the symphony had been performed in 1897. The restored score was once again being performed: in Moscow the second premiere of the symphony after being lost for almost half a century was conducted by Alexander Gauk, in Philadelphia it was conducted by Eugene Ormandy and in Leningrad it was conducted by Kurt Sanderling (his performance is quite rightly considered exemplary).
Today’s audiences reject the admonitions and claims of eclecticism that contemporaries cast at Rachmaninoff. Truly, the symphony does feature traces of enthusiasm for the St Petersburg school (meaning the music of the composers of “The Five”) and a clear influence from Tchaikovsky’s symphony music. But with the advantage of being able to see all of Rachmaninoff’s late works, in the First Symphony we can hear a wonderful portent of the maestro’s masterpieces such as his Second and Third Symphonies and Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini... It amazes us how modern – despite criticisms for conservatism – the young Rachmaninoff’s thinking was even then, at the end of the 19th century and looking into the 20th. And once again we are convinced how important it is for new music to be performed perfectly, with love and understanding.

O brawling love! O loving hate! (From Romeo’s monologue, Act I)
The names of Romeo and Juliet immediately conjure up the idea of two young loving hearts. Through Shakespeare’s pen, images of the play’s protagonists have become symbols of great love; th y have joined oth r eternal companions of humanity – Daphnis and Chloe, Dido and Aeneas, Tristan and Isolde. But in music, the life of Romeo and Juliet continued and, perhaps, took on its fullest and most perfect embodiment – in the symphony by Berlioz and the fantasy overture by Tchaikovsky, in operas by Bellini and Gounod and the brilliant ballet by Prokofiev...
It should come as no surprise that Mily Balakirev’s idea about composing a programme symphony work after Shakespeare’s tragedy found an immediate response from Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Balakirev did not confine himself to the idea, instead compiling a detailed plan for the overture, even proposing his beloved tonalities for the main and secondary th mes – in B Minor and D Flat Major.
By the middle of November Tchaikovsky had completed the score of Romeo and Juliet, a fantasy overture after Shakespeare, and on 4 March 1870 at the eighth symphony gath ring of the Russian Musical Society in Moscow the overture was performed for the first time under the baton of Nikolai Rubinstein. The overture found a welcome reception in Balakirev’s circle. According to Balakirev, Vladimir Stasov said “There were five of you – now th re are six.” Never had the artistic credos of the “Mighty Handful” and Tchaikovsky been so close. But the composer continued to perfect his favourite work. In the summer of 1870 Tchaikovsky produced a second version of the overture, which for almost ten years was performed anywhere and everywhere. It was only in 1880, however, that Tchaikovsky came to his third and final version – the composer dedicated the score to Balakirev.
The introductory chorale, which stands apart for its “ancient Catholic character, akin to Orthodoxy” (Balakirev), contains the essence of the tragedy-to-come. The harsh and passionless motif of the chorale is shaded by intonations of lamentation; behind reconciliation and blessedness th re lies a world of torment, suffering and suppressed surges... The main th me – the “savage Allegro with the clash of sabres” (Balakirev) – directly embodies the ancient hostility between the two families and the senseless and wicked hatred that stands in the path of the two lovers... From the silence that follows the cruel and pointless attack comes a melody of love, possibly the best ever of Tchaikovsky as a symphonic composer (one would like to compare it with the famous secondary th me from the first movement of the Sixth Symphony). “What inexplicable beauty, what burning passion,” said Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, “It is one of the finest th mes in any Russian music!”
In the development of the sonata allegro the th me of love is absent; instead we have the introductory chorale and main th me that reveal an unexpected similarity. The brass declaims the chorale with some incredible and frenzied evil; the convulsive rhythm of the main th me and its expert polyphonic movement in the voices of the strings – all of this creates the image of some terrible and fateful hatred. In the reprise the th me of love again meets forces that counter it – the chorale which symbolises the power of the Church and the th me of the Montagues’ and Capulets’ enmity.
In the coda of the overture the features of the beautiful love th me, becoming separated and distorted, take on the character of a distant and grief-stricken memory. The sharp, convulsive chords of the entire orchestra literally negate the longed-for reconciliation “For never was a story of more woe than this of Juliet and her Romeo”.

A waltz is danced for mere moments.
The gavotte has been danced for centuries...

Konstantin Balmont
In his sonnet dedicated to the young Sergei Prokofiev – who had composed his Third Piano Concerto – Balmont prophesied the mature maestro’s greatest ballets. Ballets about the greatness and the strength of love, ballets imbued with the languor of love, music born from love, con amore, amoroso. Some fifteen years separate the ballet scenes the poet “saw” in the Third Concerto and Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet (in which, like an echo of younger years, one can hear the Gavotte from the First “Classical” Symphony.) There would be anoth r five years before Cinderella with its typically Prokofiev “auth ntic” gavottes, bourées, passe-pieds and pavanne, with its intoxicating waltzes, variations and mazurka...
It is hard to believe that for several years the completed score of Romeo and Juliet never made it onto the Russian stage. It is hard to believe that the Bolshoi Theatre initially rejected Romeo and Juliet; the world premiere of this brilliant Russian ballet took place on 30 December 1938... in Brno in Czechoslovakia, the town of Leoš Janáček, thanks to the enthusiasm of the choreographer and performer of the lead male role Ivo Psota. Due to the tense pre-war situation (the notorious Munich Agreement) the composer did not witness the stage birth of his opus.
In Russia, the ballet was saved by the Mariinsky (th n the Kirov) Theatre; the Leningrad premiere on 11 January 1940 was a huge success and proved to be Galina Ulanova’s finest hour. But here, too, the fate of this masterpiece literally hung by a hair. Two weeks before the first performance the orchestra came to a decision at a stormy meeting: to drop the performance in order to prevent disaster! And at the th atre wits commented that “never was a story of more woe than this of Prokofiev and his ballet music”. How th y were disgraced! Apropos, long before the th atre premiere, the music from Romeo and Juliet drew an ecstatic response from audiences in concert halls. Three Suites for Symphony Orchestra from the ballet music and Ten Pieces for Piano (frequently performed by Prokofiev himself at his evenings of keyboard music) soon became extremely popular, which to a great extent also assisted the stage production of the work.
Iosif Raiskin

Age category 6+

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