L'Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal

From the Land of the Tsars

Sergei Prokofiev
Born April 23, 1891, in Sontsovka, Ukraine
Died March 5, 1953 in Nikolina Gora, near Moscow, Russia
Overture from Voyna i mir (War and Peace)
Composition: 1941-1946
Partial premiere: June 7, 1945, at the Moscow Conservatory
Concert-hall premiere: June 12, 1946, at the Maly Theatre, Leningrad

Sergei Rachmaninov
Born April 1, 1873, in Semyonovo, near Novgorod, Russia
Died March 28, 1943 in Beverly Hills, California
Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18
Composition: 1900
Premiere: October 27, 1901, by the composer
Dedication: to Nikolai Dahl, hypnotherapist
Timing: a half-hour

Alexander Borodin
Born November 11, 1833, in Saint Petersburg, Russia
Died February 27, 1887, in Saint Petersburg, Russia
Polovtsian Dances, from the opera Prince Igor
Composition: late 1870s
Premiere: February 27, 1879, in Saint Petersburg, under the direction of Rimsky-Korsakov
Timing: about 10 minutes

Igor Stravinsky
Born June 17, 1882, in Oranienbaum, Russia
Died April 6, 1971, in New York City
Firebird Suite (1919)
Composition: 1909
Premiere: complete ballet, June 25, 1910, Paris, under the direction of Gabriel Pierné
Timing: about 20 minutes

Piotr Ilyitch Tchaikovsky
Born May 7, 1840, in Votkinsk, Russia
Died November 18, 1893, in Saint Petersburg, Russia
1812 Overture, Op. 49
Premiere: August 8, 1882, in Moscow, under the direction of Ippolit Altani
Timing: about a quarter of an hour

Evoking its crucial importance in Russian music, Shostakovich specialist Benjamin Grenard recently wrote: “the tone recounts a tough life, but also the oppression imprinted in the flesh and the very soul of a people subjected to a psychic and physical pressure over centuries of a problematic relationship with power.”

And in fact, in the history of Western music, few are the nations where political instability and the collateral social, economic and human upheaval have so lastingly marked their artists as in Russia. And whereas up to the time of the last tsars the phenomenon took the form of a collective unconscious haunted by the history of its people, the 20th century would leave a direct and conscious mark on composers, whose production would be more and more closely linked with political circumstances, notably the bullying they encountered in Soviet Russia.

The fact remains that the behaviour of certain Russian creators of the modern era, their ambivalence stretching to forms of schizophrenia, still has the ability to surprise us. While Stravinsky was the only one to have proudly and definitively slammed the door behind him, Shostakovich’s visceral attachment to the motherland would keep him from emigrating in spite of daily intimidations and humiliations.

Stranger yet is the case of Prokofiev, child prodigy, young avant-gardist, he of the harsh and raw harmonies, the insisted-on formal eccentricities, the “motorism” (rhythms, sometimes obsessive, imitative of the sounds of the newly mechanized world) of a wholly industrial modernity. After the revolutions of 1917 he made his way to the United States, France and then Germany before renewing his connection with the USSR in 1927, and finally sticking his head in the lion’s mouth by deciding to return to the country for good in 1936, just before the Great Purge orchestrated by Stalin.

Above and beyond a certain masochism, should we also see in Prokofiev’s return the naiveté of someone rallying around the cry of a utopia that advocated art accessible to everyone? Whatever the case, the modernist of the Roaring Twenties, forbidden to leave the country as of 1938, would take the road of repentance until the end of his career, becoming a moderate composer whose return to tonality, a politically correct simplicity, even to melody, would be the only possible path. Goal number one, however, was born of the best intentions: to reconcile the public with the music of the day.

As if to justify his return to the USSR, Prokofiev wrote in 1937: “The time is past when music was written for a handful of esthetes. Today vast crowds of people have come face to face with serious music and are waiting with eager impatience. The search for a musical language that corresponds to the era of socialism is difficult, but for a composer this is a noble problem.”

In 1941, during the siege of Leningrad, he began five years of work on War and Peace, Tolstoy’s roman-fleuve, which ranks among the greatest national panoramas, an exaltation of patriotism and amorous passion, auspicious themes in those troubled times. The opera, a centrepiece of the genre, was a hit.

Through an irony of fate, that success would not prevent its author, like Shostakovich and Khachaturian, from suffering the slander of the Zhdanov decree that in 1948 accused his music, too far removed from the virtues of socialist realism, of “formalism.” And through a sad trick of the calendar, the unclassifiable composer, never rehabilitated, died suddenly on March 5, 1953, a few hours before Stalin. In the face of the demise of the “Father of Nations,” Prokofiev’s understandably passed completely unnoticed.

Igor Stravinsky had already set off on his conquest of Western Europe when the Revolution of 1917 took place, and he never concealed his animosity towards Soviet Russia, nor did he ever regret his permanent exile. A participant in Paris’s incredible cultural effervescence at the turn of the 20th century, he teamed up with Diaghilev and drew on private lessons from Rimsky-Korsakov in his first opus written for the Ballets Russes in the French capital: Firebird. A little later, Petrushka with its barnstorm theatre and then the scandalous primitive scansions of The Rite of Spring would give the cold shoulder to this esthetic, still scented with the perfume of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade.

Of 1909’s original complete ballet, the Firebird suite from 1919 retains only the best-known episodes: Introduction, slow and mysterious in the low notes; The Firebird and Its Dance, elusive in a Fauvist way; Khorovod (Round Dance of the Princesses) with its delicate oboe solo; Infernal Dance of King Kashchei with its collisions of timbre whose barbarism presages The Rite of Spring; Lullaby on a sweetly nostalgic bassoon; and lastly the Finale, started by a solar horn solo that leads to a dazzling conclusion. Written for an orchestra scaled down from the original, with some quite noteworthy tone transfers, this second suite, worked out during the composer’s Swiss period, remains the most performed and best arranged of the three he did.

Loving nothing so much as family life, deaf to most of the vicissitudes of his time – although inconsolable in self-exile in the United States after 1917 – Sergei Rachmaninov always remained deeply anchored in the 19th century, confined to late romanticism. Of him, Stravinsky in his acerbic way would say, “His sulkiness summed him up perfectly, and always will.” Fragile, tormented, distressed by a world changing too quickly, the failure of his First Symphony would prove too much for Rachmaninov and sink him into a depression that only psychologist and hypnotherapist Nikolai Dahl could pull him out of – and their sessions resulted in the Piano Concerto No. 2, dedicated to Dahl as a gesture of gratitude.

The concerto is unmistakably Russian not only in its emotional content but in its boldness: the initial entry by the solo piano, playing its serene chords and the repeated crescendo tolling in the extreme bass of the keyboard, might be evoking the bells of Cathedral of St. Sophia in Novgorod, where little Sergei grew up.

The piano then plays the role of accompanist to the strings as they state their poignant theme, before engaging in a dialogue on equal terms with the orchestra. Aiming for the same pureness of expression, above any analysis or search for form, the slow movement, Adagio sostenuto, is a summit, granted a very late one, of romantic literature for piano. The final Allegretto scherzando provides greater scope for virtuosity, with a sparkling orchestration.

A glorious vestige of the past at a time when the great Russian masters were making a sensational entry into modernity – think for an instant of the harmonic stamp of a Scriabin at the turn of the same century or the contemporary concertos of Prokofiev, to be convinced of it – Rachmaninov remains none the less a champion of the most sincere sort of feeling and in terms of melodic art one of the most inspired creators.

Mentor of and model for Rachmaninov, who was stricken with grief by his death in 1893, Piotr Ilyitch Tchaikovsky is often considered the most Western of the Russian romantics because of his recourse to the classical mould and his orchestration. Careful to remain at the margin of what was known as “The Five” or “The Mighty Handful” – Balakirev (its creator), Mussorgsky, Cui, Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin – whose hostility to Germanic influences struck him as excessive, the uncontested master of the symphony and ballet music also produced a number of occasional pieces. One of these was the 1812 Overture, a work commissioned at the instigation of Tchaikovsky’s friend Nikolai Rubinstein for the Moscow Arts and Industry Exhibition of 1882, which celebrated the 70th anniversary of the victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Borodino.

Conscious of not composing his masterpiece – “what can be written for the opening of an exhibition, apart from noisy clichés?” – Tchaikovsky devoted very little time to it. The work begins with the Russian Orthodox hymn “God Preserve Thy People” in the strings – which can be substituted for ad libitum by a chorus – which is followed by various themes depicting the woes of the Russian people at the hands of the invading French, until Russian canon roar in answer to echoes of the Marseillaise, the French armies retreat, bells of victory ring out, the hymn is heard again, a chase scene ensues and then “God Save the Tsar!” (the national anthem in Tchaikovsky’s time) leads to a victorious conclusion. The 1812 Overture has since become a warhorse for orchestras and conductors, who have the means and the music at their disposal to conclude a symphony program as triumphantly as possible.

Not a very prolific composer –a “Sunday composer” was how he referred to himself; he made a living as a professor of chemistry – but each of whose works is of undeniable quality, Alexander Borodin was the most free-spirited, the least openly anti-Germanic of the Five. When he died, in 1887, he left Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov the difficult task of finishing his masterpiece, the historical opera Prince Igor, begun in 1869 and not premiered until November 4, 1890, at Saint Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre.

His most often performed work in symphonic programs, the Polovtsian Dances – from the name of a late-ninth-century semi-nomadic people known for pillaging a number of Russian towns – are taken from Act II of the opera, where they do service as a ballet and an entertainment, organized as a folkdance suite alternating between numbers for females and numbers for males. The most famous is still the General Dance in three-quarter time, shot through with percussion crescendi and syncopation, imposingly epic in spirit, presented this evening like the rest of the piece in its version for orchestra alone, without the choral parts.

Yannick MILLON