Bambi. In the Jungle

Performers

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Age category 6+

Credits

Composer: Alexander Lokshin
Choreographer: Anton Pimonov
Librettist and Designer: Anna Matison
Lighting Designer: Alexander Sivaev

SYNOPSIS

Bambi’s children the deer Gurri and Geno are walking alone. Playing, they suddenly find themselves in a strange part of the forest – it is dark and mysterious. Geno is afraid, but Gurri is delighted at this new adventure. She thinks up a new piece of fun – rolling in liana plants as if they were swings. They are joined by another two deer – Boso and Lana. The imagination of these happy four deer transforms the wood into magical jungles and the liana into a snake. The Woodpecker appears, followed by the Jay and even a Tiger. But Geno suddenly stops playing – he senses that strangers have arrived in the forest.
Suddenly people appear in the field – they are behaving disgracefully and in an unruly fashion. The animals all prefer to hide – only the curious Gurri remains to observe them.
One man stands out from the rest of the noisy company – he is the Hunter. He might be able to keep the people quiet for some time, but as soon as he turns his back the merriment will be louder than before. Suddenly the Hunter spots Gurri. The trusting and bold deer wants to prove what it is capable of. Gurri leaps merrily, trying to repeat the movements she has seen from people but stumbles, falls and cannot get up. The observers lose interest in her and depart. Only the hunter tries to help the unlucky beast. He picks Gurri up and takes her out of the forest. Geno returns with his friends but is in despair at not finding his sister and thinks she has died.
Night falls. Bambi is looking for his daughter. He is assisted by the Fire-Flies – by lighting the path they take him in the Hunter’s path. Seeing the Leader, the Hunter bows down before him and restores Gurri to him. She can walk, but she is still very weak. Bambi leaves her in the meadow surrounded by the Fire-Flies and himself disappears into a clearing. In the curative glow of the Fire-Flies she recovers.
Early in the morning Gurri awakes happy and confident – the birds are singing all around and life is beautiful once more. Geno and the other animals are delighted that she is well again.
Suddenly Geno hears something and makes a sign – the people are returning!
The forest carefully conceals its residents from their enemies. Breaking branches and throwing the liana plants to the side, the hunters pass through the clearing. Suddenly they see Gurri. She makes no attempt to flee and in surprise looks at the hunter taking aim at her. A shot rings out, but at the last minute the Hunter himself manages to stand in the way. In fury the animals launch themselves at their assailants. In the stormy battle the people are beaten and run away in shame.
Night falls in the jungle. Gurri feels sorry for her wounded protector. The Fire-Flies descend – with their magical light they cure the Hunter. The animals are happy.
But suddenly the leaves rustle again and the animals freeze – but this time the people come in friendship. They apologise to Gurri and she forgives them. Peace has been restored.
From afar Bambi, now the Leader, looks on.

Premiere: 13 March 2015, Mariinsky Theatre
Running time: 25 minutes

In Jungles, suite for symphony orchestra (1960)

We are captive beasts,
We sing as we can.
The doors are firmly shut,
We dare not open them.
Fyodor Sologub

This epigraph is borrowed from Fyodor Sologub’s Three Poems for soprano and piano which was set to music by Alexander Lokshin in 1983 and performed – of course, it was not possible earlier – in 1988, a year after the composer’s death. That’s how his life panned out: in the Soviet era it was only possible to write music to verse by the ideologically foreign Baudelaire or Kipling, texts from Akhmatova’s Requiem or an Orthodox funeral service “for the drawer”. It is not by chance that Lokshin commented in his autobiography that “... I never heard my First, Sixth or Eighth Symphonies, the cantata A Grieving Mother, the comic oratorio The Cockroach or the first two pieces from Three Scenes from Goethe’s “Faust”. And that is far from an exhaustive list of works that were banned – directly or indirectly.
It may have been impossible to depict people this way, but animals were a different matter! There are many vivid pages in Lokshin’s film music – seemingly composed merely to earn a wage. The popular natural science film Jungle Path (1959) made by director Alexander Zguridi received the State Lomonosov Prize among other awards. The composer made a significant contribution of his own to the film’s success. The suite In Jungles was first performed as far back as 1960 – a rare case of a piece being noticed in a timely manner by musicians – under the baton of conductor Arvid Jansons, an admirer of Lokshin’s work.
The film might have been about animals, but Lokshin’s music was always about people! Nature and the world of the jungle (a nod to Kipling!) are depicted with a keen eye – or rather the composer’s keen ear. The suite is a work of an established maestro (the composer himself stated that his individual style dated back to the late 1950s). Alongside his multi-movement symphonic and vocal suites (cycles) this suite, too, may be regarded as a unique symphony, borne out by the drama and form of the work as a whole, the thematic arches and the contrasting episodic scenes... The suite – written earlier than Lokshin’s other symphonies (apart from the Requiem First Symphony dating to 1957) – heralded the most important thing in this symphony composer’s work – the rejection of traditional schemes and the search for an individual form for each symphony.
The very first bars of the Introduction, seemingly typical of a soundtrack for a nature film, contain unhidden allusions to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. This nostalgic note immediately humanises the narrative about our smaller fellow beings. In the music of In Jungles one can sense the aromatic atmosphere of a tropical forest, mysterious, alarming and bewitching with its primordial magnificence. Apes Playing is a symphonic scherzo, amusing and even mocking with its sharp gibes. The middle episode is slow blues music, languid and unusually beautiful (there are latent polemics with the critics of “ape-like” jazz). Lokshin is an amazing melodist – he could make blues a hit at both jazz festivals and on the dance floor! Night takes the place of the more usual adagio in the symphony cycle. A master of orchestration, Lokshin uses modest means to depict an almost visible panorama of a sleeping forest. Birds is yet another virtuoso instrumental scherzo in which the composer pays tribute to his favourite teachers – Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky (the listener will also think of the Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks, Firebird and Daphnis et Chloé...). The Hunt is a musical tableau of an exotic indigenous hunt – the beasts are frightened and chased by a musical weapon – the battery of percussion instruments. The inexorably pulsating and threatening rhythm of the pursuit is coloured with myriad rhythmic decorative adornments – rustling, ringing out and thundering... In the culmination the percussion is joined by the howling brass. The suite concludes with a Battue and Finale: the impetuous “hunt” cedes to the apotheosis. The mood of the introductory section of the suite returns and in the powerful sound of the brass and the glittering orchestral tutti we can hear once more allusions to Mahler’s rejoicing finales. That’s how the suite concludes – one could boldly call it Alexander Lokshin’s Pastoral Symphony.
But it is equally easy to see In Jungles as a ballet score. Not just because starting with Fyodor Lopukhov and George Balanchine we were taught to convey “pure” programme music through the language of dance, but also because Alexander Lokshin’s suite with its own imagery and subject inventiveness opens up scope for the choreographer and the dancers’ creative imagination.
Iosif Raiskin