French and Russian music from a concert in the Auckland Philharmonia's Great Classics Series.
Edmund Blair Leighton - Pelléas et Mélisande Photo: Public Domain
Maurice Maeterlinck’s play Pelléas et Mélisande from 1893, set in the imagined medieval land of Allemonde, is all about the forbidden and doomed love of the two title characters. It’s a Symbolist play – it’s truths are hidden within metaphors and other veils of meaning. Everything is a little misty. And images of water pervade.
As a straight play, it never attained great success on the stage, but its impact on music was immense. There’s Debussy’s opera and Schoenberg’s Symphonic Poem; Sibelius wrote incidental music for a production in Sweden in 1905. And Fauré wrote his music for a London production in 1898. He later extracted four movements for a concert suite, which is all that is usually heard these days.
After a Prelude, the second movement is titled ‘Fileuse’ – Mélisande is at her spinning wheel. The third movement ‘Sicilienne’ is probably the most famous bit – it depicts the only happy moment in the play between the lovers. And the final movement is the ‘Death of Mélisande’.
The Five, otherwise known as The Mighty Handful was a group of five prominent 19th-century composers who worked together to create a distinctly Russian national classical style. They were led by Balakirev and as well as Rimsky-Korsakov and Cui, the other two, represented in this concert, were Mussorgsky and Borodin.
Mussorgsky’s short tone poem ‘Night on the Bare Mountain’ depicts the revels of a witches’ Sabbath on St John’s Eve – the shortest night of the year, that is the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere.
Mussorgsky wrote many different versions of the work over his lifetime, many unfinished, and none that came to be performed while he was alive. This version is the version orchestrated by Rimsky-Korsakov based on various of Mussorgsky’s iterations of the piece. Many scholars actually consider the work to be more Rimsky than Mussorgsky.
Alexander Borodin was primarily a chemist and teacher at the Medico-Surgical Academy in St Petersburg and his compositions were completed as time permitted away from this day job. The Second Symphony took him about seven years to write.
His friend and biographer, Vladimir Stasov wrote in an article that Borodin had told him that in the first movement he was trying to depict a gathering of Russian warrior-heroes, in the slow movement the figure of a bayan—a type of Russian accordion, and in the finale a scene of the heroes feasting to the sound of guslis—which is an ancient instrument like a zither.
There’s also a Scherzo second movement thrown in there for good measure.
Recorded by RNZ Concert in Auckland Town Hall, 21 April 2022
Producer: Tim Dodd; Engineer: Adrian Hollay
