PERFORMERS:
Soloist: Kristóf Baráti (violin)
The Mariinsky Orchestra
Conductor: Valery Gergiev
PROGRAMME:
Camille Saint-Saëns
Introduction et rondo capriccioso for violin, Op. 28
Felix Mendelssohn
Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64
Sergei Prokofiev
Highlights from the score of the ballet Cinderella
The finest comment about the Violin Concerto by Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847) could be the life itself of the composer and artist, idolised and called the “Mozart of the 19th century” by Schumann.
By the age of fifteen, Mendelssohn had composed numerous works in many genres. His teacher Carl Friedrich Zelter “in the name of Mozart, in the name of Haydn and in the name of the old man Bach” introduced Felix to his apprenticeship. Soon the overture A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1826) would bring the sixteen-year-old composer the laurels of immortality; the “apprentice” had become an acclaimed maestro.
At the age of twenty he breathed new life into Bach’s Matthäus-Passion. A grateful pupil, he revived Handel’s oratorios and for the first time performed Schubert’s long forgotten Symphony in C Major, The Great, which had been revived by Schumann. An honorary citizen of Leipzig, he founded the first conservatoire in Germany... Mendelssohn combined modern trends with traditions; the harmoniousness of his outlook made him a “classic” among the Romantic composers.
Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor (1844) stands alongside the brilliant concerti of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky... His music is filled with romantic ardour and impresses with its melodic beauty and surprisingly plastique form. The work, which appears to have been born in a single burst of inspiration, was planned over a lengthy period; the composer sought advice about the solo violin part from his friend Ferdinand David, an outstanding violinist and professor at the Leipzig Conservatoire. It was he who performed the premiere of the concerto in Leipzig on 27 March 1845.
Iosif Raiskin
The plot of Sergei Prokofiev’s ballet Cinderella, taken from the fairytale by Charles Perrault, was interpreted in a very unusually fashion. In 1941 the composer said in an interview that “The plot is based on the fairytale of Cinderella – a story that exists in all nations and all peoples but which I wanted to take as a truly Russian story.” It is not easy to find traces of Russian fairytales, though it is easy to think of the numerous Hollywood “Cinderellas” who went on to find their princes. Only Prokofiev’s music colours this optimistic Hollywood tale in somewhat sad tones: because in real life a beautiful dream very rarely becomes a reality.
The Kirov Theatre commissioned Prokofiev to write Cinderella, and the premiere was due to take place in the 1942–43 season, but the War intervened. As a result the ballet was only completed in 1944 and on 21 November 1945 it was performed at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. On 8 April the next year Cinderella was shown to residents of Leningrad – with choreography by Konstantin Sergeyev and with the composer’s original score (in Moscow it had been considered too clear and it was “sanitised”).
The ballet is composed in traditional forms with an abundance of old ballroom dances, and so it was rather easy to create suites from the music. In this sense Cinderella is a record holder: in 1943 and 1944 the composer released two piano suites followed by three symphonic suites in 1946 which included almost half of the ballet’s music – twenty-two of the total fifty numbers.
Anna Bulycheva
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