Rachmaninoff the Bells • Spring Three Russian Songs
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Rachmaninoff The Bells • Spring Three Russian Songs Svetla Vassileva soprano Misha Didyk tenor Alexei Tanovitski bass Chorus of the Mariinsky Theatre BBC Philharmonic Gianandrea Noseda Serge Rachmaninoff © Rachmaninoff Foundation Serge Rachmaninoff (1873 – 1943) 1 Spring, Op. 20 14:36 for Baritone Solo, Choir and Orchestra Allegro moderato. Meno Mosso – Più vivo (Tempo I) – Meno mosso – Moderato – Allegro risoluto – Moderato – Allegro risoluto – L’istesso tempo – Meno mosso – Tempo precidente – Moderato – Un poco più vivo – Più mosso – Più mosso – Più mosso – Allegro con fuoco – Moderato – L’istesso tempo – Meno mosso – Un poco più mosso Three Russian Songs, Op. 41 11:29 for Symphony Orchestra and Chorus 2 1 Moderato (alla breve). Allegro assai – Più vivo – Moderato – Tempo I (poco meno mosso) – Più mosso 3:03 3 2 Largo. 4:37 4 3 Allegro moderato (Alla marcia, al rigore di tempo) – Meno mosso 3:41 3 The Bells, Op. 35 36:26 for Chorus, Orchestra and Soloists Russian Poem by K.Balmont adapted from The Bells by E.A. Poe 5 1 Allegro, ma non tanto. Meno mosso – Largo un poco – Tempo I – Meno mosso. Maestoso 6:19 6 2 Lento. Poco più mosso – Tempo I – Poco più mosso – Tempo I – Poco più mosso – Più mosso – Meno mosso – Adagio – Poco più mosso 10:23 7 3 Presto. Meno mosso – Tempo I – Meno mosso – Poco meno – Poco meno – Meno mosso – Prestissimo – Calando – Meno mosso – Prestissimo 9:09 8 4 Lento lugubre. Poco più mosso – Poco più mosso – Poco più mosso – Allegro – Andante – Tempo I – 10:19 TT 62:53 Svetla Vassileva soprano Misha Didyk tenor Alexei Tanovitski bass Chorus of the Mariinsky Theatre BBC Philharmonic Yuri Torchinsky leader Gianandrea Noseda 4 Rachmaninoff: Choral Works The Bells, Op. 35 church-related fixations – znamenny chant Native notes flow in a mostly subterranean and the mediaeval catholic judgement-day stream through Rachmaninoff’s works, poem, the Dies Irae, used to macabre effect in especially in the stepwise movements of the orchestral predecessor to The Bells, the the Russian Orthodox Church’s znamenny, or 1909 tone poem inspired by Arnold Böcklin’s sign chant, which inform many of the great painting The Isle of the Dead. themes in his concertos and symphonies. The Bells is clearly the next step on that But at least two of the three works on this symphonic path not only because it, too, disc place a love of mother Russia’s greatest has its roots in liturgical music but also musical gifts to the composer – bells and because Rachmaninoff explicitly called folksongs – at the forefront; it is little wonder it a Choral Symphony, not a cantata; he Rachmaninoff valued them so highly. had already sketched a plan for a purely ‘All my life’, he declared in his orchestral symphony before an anonymous reminiscences, ‘I have taken pleasure in the correspondent sent him verses by Edgar Allan differing moods and music of gladly chiming Poe in a very free translation by the Russian and mournfully tolling bells’. He gives two symbolist poet Konstantin Balmont. Settling in examples of their impact on the Russian Rome for the winter of 1912 – 13 and occupying soul. One is a vivid anecdote of Chekhov at first the very same rooms overlooking hearing the vesper bells and declaring they the Piazza di Spagna which his beloved were ‘all that religion has left me’. The other Tchaikovsky had used as a retreat in the is how the ‘four silvery weeping notes’ of late 1870s, he worked at fever pitch on Novgorod’s Saint Sophia Cathedral, familiar The Bells from early morning to sunset every to Rachmaninoff from childhood, found their day. He also conducted the St Petersburg way into his First Suite for two pianos and his premiere on 30 November 1913 – the chorus opera The Miserly Knight. The bell songs of was that of the Mariinsky Theatre, though Kolokola (to give The Bells its musical Russian obviously with different personnel from title) are never far from Rachmaninoff’s other the ones we hear captured ninety-eight 5 years later – and the critical reception was richly divided strings convey the sensuous unusually perceptive, one Boris Tyuneyev rapture of the bride, but that, too, is undercut noting that those familiar ‘concentrated by solemn choral writing and disconcerting shades of hopeless anguish and despair… shifts of orchestral colour. Simple melodic pessimistic passion and sublime tragedy’ patterns contrast with chromatic yearning, which Rachmaninoff had inherited from Rachmaninoff indebted, like every other Tchaikovsky, stood revealed with ‘unusual composer of the late nineteenth and early clarity’ and ‘special force’. twentieth centuries, to Wagner’s Tristan und Poe’s poetry, as filtered through Balmont, Isolde. Rachmaninoff’s new-found daring in promises a half-bright, half-black ritual; but harmony and subtlety of orchestration are even in the first two settings, pensive or encapsulated in the two clarinets’ last word, sombre musical moods cloud the scene. only reluctantly coming to rest in D major. Celebration of the ‘silver sleigh-bells’ takes ‘A tale of horror’ follows, with up where the jubilant finale of the Second Rachmaninoff unleashing all his orchestral Symphony left off, but with a newly refined demons to match Poe’s terrors in a tapestry sense of orchestral fantasy, glittering and mixing panic and lament. Lurid cross- flashing with superb writing for celesta, rhythms and syncopations offer a startling string harmonics, harp and muted trumpets anticipation of Adams, and American around the high tenor solo. Mysticism minimalism, but otherwise Rachmaninoff suspends time in a bittersweet, quasi- is looking back to the nabat, or alarm- liturgical humming chorus as Poe writes bell, scenes of Russian opera, and also of ‘universal slumber’, but the excitement to the Russian people’s plea for mercy in returns to introduce a new theme at the Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov. Rachmaninoff majestic climax, descending in steps from simplified the tricky choral writing for a a single, repeated high B flat. This is, in Sheffield Festival performance in 1936, but fact, the leading ‘bell song’ of the work, the original version, which ideally needs a and as phrased by muted violas at the professional choir who understands the text, start of the next movement, punctuated by as here, is more overwhelming. Mussorgskyan chimes, it comes to sound The slow lament of ‘Funeral Bells’ emulates like the Dies Irae. The mood of this wedding the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique rhapsody is elusive: the soprano and the Symphony, and at first is perhaps even more 6 desolate in its fear of death, shared between of their nuptial counterparts in the second cor anglais and the expressive bass-baritone; movement of The Bells. In the central there is also a sense of crossing a sea or narrative of the baritone-peasant’s winter a river of death, as previously depicted in broodings the resemblance is even closer Sibelius’s Swan of Tuonela (same choice of because here, appropriately enough, the baleful woodwind solo), and Rachmaninoff’s phrases turn downwards in despair. own tone poem based on the sombre Böcklin Other thematic patterns, in for example painting The Isle of the Dead (the multi-part the stepwise, chant-based melodising that string rocking conveys a similar liquidity). follows the first stirrings of divided cellos Panicked flurries lead to two climaxes against higher-register snow flurries, may which threaten the mood of the ‘Alarm bells’ seem closer to the world of the Second movement, but at the last hour, though [one Piano Concerto, premiered little over four of these would be redundant], redemption months before Spring which was first strikes. With a luminosity akin to Mahler in heard in Moscow on 11 March 1902. The the transfigured conclusion of his Tenth great bass Fyodor Chaliapin did not take Symphony (which Rachmaninoff would not, part in that premiere, but later became of course, have known), the composer glides closely associated with the role of the from C sharp minor into D flat major, one spring-redeemed peasant; he sang in a 1907 step away from the four flats of the work’s Paris performance, after which Rimsky- childlike opening, and movingly gives the lie Korsakov, spring-worshipping composer to Poe: there is rest and respite beyond the of The Snow Maiden, took Rachmaninoff quiet of the tomb. to task for not depicting the change of season in the orchestra. Not quite true; Spring, Op. 20 while it is the chorus which truly breaks the There is one clear connection between the ice, the metamorphosis is all there in the 1902 setting of Nekrasov’s ‘Vernal Uproar’, introduction. Spring, a Cantata for baritone, chorus and orchestra, Op. 20, and Rachmaninoff’s Three Russian Songs, Op. 41 Poe-based masterpiece: the choral unisons Another choral work came close on the heels hailing the spring are almost an inverted, in of another piano concerto, the Fourth, in other words upward-looking, foreshadowing 1926, but the circumstances could hardly 7 have been more different. Rachmaninoff Rachmaninoff pulls his own melody out of had been living and exhaustively touring the bag and has the chorus of basses and as pianist in America for the previous altos split in the counterpoint which the folk eight years, and the wellspring of original melodies themselves have so far forbidden. inspiration was running dry. That may have The score is dedicated to Leopold been why, as he was later to do with the Stokowski, whose Philadelphia forces at Corelli and Paganini Variations, the composer that first performance apparently saved turned elsewhere for his melodic substance. the day after a disastrous premiere of The music of the homeland he was never the Fourth Piano Concerto. Hearing these to see again brought one of his deepest, songs in Moscow in 1934, Vladimir Wilshaw, most undervalued responses, all the more Rachmaninoff’s old friend from student days, remarkable for its restraint, the Three Russian told him how he had wept, and added: Songs for chorus and orchestra, Op.