Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade, Moussorgski: Une Nuit sur Le Mont Chauve (1867 & 1880)

Description

Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade and Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain are two of the most popular works in the Russian repertoire. Sir Antonio Pappano therefore seeks to strengthen the links that unite them by programming them together. He also gives us the chance to hear two rare versions of Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain. One is for orchestra (1867) and the other for orchestra and choir (as conceived for the opera The Fair at Sorochyntsi (1880). This second version was never performed in his lifetime because of its highly unusual character for the time. Mussorgsky (1839-1881) and Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) were both members of the group of Russian composers known as The Five or The Mighty Handful (the others were Borodin, Balakirev and Cui). Rimsky-Korsakov, a highly sophisticated musician, recognized the surprising talent and originality of his rough and nonconformist colleague, whose works seemed a challenge to the musical establishment. After Mussorgsky’s premature death, Rimsky-Korsakov hoped to secure a future for two of his most striking scores - the opera Boris Godunov and the symphonic poem Night on Bald Mountain - by reworking them, making them more conventionally appealing and more easily accessible. Rimsky-Korsakov wrote: “My conscience will be at peace, for I have done for his music and memory all that I was capable of doing and that I had to do out of duty.” Rimsky-Korsakov’s version of Night on Bald Mountain remains popular, but it is not included on this album. Instead, the programme offers two different iterations of Mussorgsky’s own work. The first, a purely orchestral version, was written in the 1860s. It is inspired by a lost play, The Witch by Georgi Mengden, and depicts a witches’ sabbath. A few years later, around 1880, Mussorgsky revised it, creating a work for orchestra, adult choir, children’s choir and solo singer (on this recording the Bulgarian bass Dejan Vatchkov). It is an episode from his opera The Fair at Sorochyntsi, based on a play by Nikolai Gogol: Satan appears with his diabolical hordes at the nocturnal hours of St John’s Day, at the time of the summer solstice. Mussorgsky never completed The Fair at Sorochyntsi and this second version of Night on Bald Mountain was orchestrated by Vissarion Shebalin, who produced an edition of the opera in 1930. As Antonio Pappano says: “It’s a shock, after being used to Rimsky-Korsakov’s upholstered edition of Night on Bald Mountain, to hear this almost skeletal orchestration.... The sounds don’t blend and the rhythms just leap out in a different way. The usual lack of sophistication in Mussorgsky’s writing creates a bite that is very unusual for the time this music was composed.... The way he handles rhythmic gestures is almost a prefiguration of Stravinsky... Mussorgsky’s harmonies are astonishingly nonconformist for the time. Especially when he writes blocks of chords, they are closely linked to Russian Orthodox church music... It’s stripped down and unadorned, with absolute rawness... It’s as if the unvarnished directness of his music reflected his own rough and difficult character in life.” By contrast, Rimsky-Korsakov’s iridescent symphonic suite Scheherazade, which tells four tales from One Thousand and One Nights, is, in Antonio Pappano’s words, “a superb showpiece for the orchestra”. He adds that “it is technically very difficult, as well as musically for the conductor who has to convey the sense of storytelling convincingly... It is full of pictorial images... There are often chamber-music textures in Scheherazade... They seduce the listener’s ear - what a contrast with Mussorgsky! But of course you need a top-class orchestra to achieve these effects. It is especially in the most transparent and singing moments of the score that the quality of the orchestra is really decisive. Italian orchestral musicians are known for their sonority and singing style, so I find this piece ideal for the Orchestra of Santa Cecilia.”