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
The highlighting of performances by age represents recommendations.
This highlighting is being used in accordance with Federal Law N436-FZ dated 29 December 2010 (edition dated 1 May 2019) "On the protection of children from information that may be harmful to their health"