Composing With a Russian Accent: The Orchestral Music of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

 In some ways, the most “Russian” of all Russian composers is Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (the name alone would place him high on the list!), as he not only jumpstarted Russian orchestral music and opera, but he was deeply connected to the wellsprings of Russian folklore and literature. Rimsky-Korsakov’s work can be seen on some level as an attempt to translate the Russian spirit into purely musical terms, and his innovations have been followed by generations of Russian composers, not to mention film composers in Hollywood. It’s hard to truly pin down Rimsky’s compositional persona, as his greatest achievements—his 15 operas, on a range of fairy tale and historical subjects—are almost completely unknown in the West, while his memory lives on in a handful of orchestral gems which often disguise his Russian heritage, such as Capriccio Espagnol, Scheherazde, and the infamous Flight of the Bumblebee. Ultimately, what distinguishes Rimsky-Korsakov’s art is his masterful orchestration and sense of musical color: he believed strongly in the idea that notes represented colors, and clothed his music in the most lavish tonal raiment. Rachmaninov once said that with Rimsky-Korsakov’s music you could ‘hear’ the seasons, with the right combination of notes and instruments creating snowflakes, driving winds, budding trees, and falling leaves. He saved his greatest orchestral effects for his operas, where sadly few listeners are able to find them, though a few orchestral works betray this talent, even though his heart wasn’t always in ‘absolute’ music. However, even a lollipop of a piece like The Flight of the Bumblebee (a little interlude in his opera, The Tale of Tsar Saltan) is a masterful tone poem of sound and fury, suggesting how with the simplest of means he could conjure up an entire world, large or small.

The Music of Flame: The Orchestral Music of Alexander Scriabin

Imagine this, if you will: a gorgeous, pre-Raphaelite temple (to no particular god) set amidst the sublime landscape of the Himalayas.  You arrive for the performance of a lifetime—namely, Alexander Scriabin’s magnum opus, Mysterium, a work for orchestra, chorus, soloists, dancers, odors, colors, and perhaps the earth itself, which is to last an entire week.  At the conclusion of the work, the audience, along with the performers and the composer himself will die—ascending to the heavens in a state of cosmic bliss. In other words, the end of the world.  A kitschy bit of 21st century avant-garde postmodern performance art?  Hardly...it was a work Scriabin conceived around 1909 and worked on feverishly until his death in 1915.  Scriabin began life as a virtuoso-composer in the mold of Chopin or Liszt, writing conventionally perfumed piano music in traditional forms—Preludes, Mazurkas, Etudes.  After an apprentice period which also saw the composition of two symphonies and a piano concerto, Scriabin immersed himself in the writings of Nietszche and conceived more grandiose ambitions for his music.  This only intensified once he became a member of the Theosophical Society and sought to embody the beliefs of Madame Blavatsky in art.  His piano music all-but departed from tonality, and he invented what he termed the “chord of the pleorma” (later called the “mystic chord”) which became the basis for many late compositions.  [read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystic_chord].  Indeed, his middle and late music seemed to be as much about sight and smell as music itself, and he developed an elaborate system of colors correlating to each musical note (a system that other contemporaries, such as Rimsky-Korsakov, also espoused).  By the turn of the century, Scriabin seemed poised to be the messiah of a new branch of composition that would change music—and indeed, the world—forever.  But it was not to be: he tragically died of a lip infection at the tragically young age of 43, before many of his ideas could reach fruition.  

Prokofiev’s Symphonies: A Cycle for the Ages?

In classical music we refer to Beethoven’s Nine Symphonies, or Schumann or Brahms’ Four, or the Nine of Bruckner or Mahler.  To a lesser extent, the Seven of Sibelius are invoked, or the Fifteen of Shostakovich, the Three of Rachmaninov, or the Nine of Dvorak (though almost no one plays the first four).  Then there are composers who despite writing a good deal of symphonies, never composed a true “cycle” in the Romantic sense.  For many critics, a composer’s symphonies need to have some kind of consistency or development which makes them all of a piece, each one building on the other or reaching to some immeasurable height.  Beethoven’s Nine are all great statements, even the early, Mozartian ones; this is certainly true of Bruckner’s massive essays in symphonic form, as each one attempts to take up the struggle where Beethoven’s Ninth left off. So what do we do with someone like Prokofiev, who wrote seven magnificent, eccentric, erratic works which often defy categorization and are almost never played (and rarely recorded as a set).  Can we approach his symphonies are a cycle, though his approach to symphonic writing was haphazard and often blatantly theatrical (as several works borrow from his stage music)?  Or even more to the point, does a cycle have to consist of equally popular and lasting works, or can some have almost no identity outside of the cycle itself?  Here’s a quick look at Prokofiev’s seven—er, seven and a half—symphonies and why they should be considered as a cycle in their own right, as well as magnificent compositions individually. 

The Forgotten Russian: The Music of Anton Rubinstein

The Forgotten Russian: The Music of Anton Rubinstein (1829-1894)

“Russians call me German, Germans call me Russian, Jews call me a Christian, Christians a Jew. Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary. My conclusion is that I am neither fish nor fowl—a pitiful individual” (Anton Rubinstein)

History is like a great wave crashing down on the sandcastle of art: for a moment, everything is obscured, but once it begins to recede, a few details of the castle remain—a tower, perhaps, standing tall against the ruins of time.  Our moment of time is like the wave; we can’t really tell what will survive and what will perish.  Only with the passing of time can we recognize art that continues to speak to us, with a voice that even hundreds of years later we can understand.  However, this metaphor leaves one important detail out: the castle can be rebuilt.  With art, the reconstruction is simple; discovering the work of one ‘survivor’ often leads to curiosity about his/her contemporaries, whose works may have been washed away into the ocean of time.  Yet most of these works remain, buried quite shallowly in the sand.  A simple plastic shovel (and in our time, the wonders of the internet) is all that is required to earth the treasure trove of riches lying scattered at our feet.  And what riches!  The ocean, it seems, is quite fickle and can’t really distinguish between good or bad, timeless or worthless art.  Quite often, a great work—say, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons concertos, or Aphra Benh’s Oroonoko—are uncovered after hundreds of years of neglect.  At other times, we merely find a completely enjoyable work of art that will probably disappear with the next wave.  Such a discovery is the work of Anton Rubinstein, a once celebrated composer/pianist whose memory lives on solely through his association with a much more lasting composer, Tchaikovsky. 

Focus on Sergei Rachmaninov, Part I: Symphony No.3 (1936)

Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninov is something of a 20th century enigma: he doesn’t fit neatly into the parade of modernist composers who blossomed in Europe and Russia in the early years of the 20th century, and he stubbornly resisted the tide of serialism that conquered the composing world soon after WWI. However, it is incorrect to call him an anachronism, either, as his music could not have been written in the 19th century, and throughout his works are subtle hallmarks of a ‘modern’ ear, one that combined the true sensibility of Romanticism with a world-weary, and at times, despairing 20th century outlook. Even before his death, the critical music world dismissed him as a has-been (and to some, a never-was), though his works stubbornly refused to disappear from the repertory. Audiences clamored to hear his 2nd and 3rd piano concertos, the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, his 2nd symphony, and numerous piano works, including the haunting, often Chopinesque Preludes. It wasn’t until serialism had run its course (and even academics were admitting that audiences would never completely warm to its rigors) that conductors, musicians, and critics began the ‘thaw’ of Rachmaninov’s legacy. Sure, some of the works never entirely fell out of favor, but what of all the other works—the 2 other piano concertos, the 3 other symphonies, and a slew of piano works that few pianists dared to attempt (such as the First Piano Sonata, or the unrevised version of the Second). Today, Rachmaninov is one of the most-recorded composers in the catalogue, his reputation as a 20th century master firmly established, and a true link between the generation of Tchaikovsky and the neo-Romantics, including many modernist-Romantics such as Samuel Barber and Erich Korngold. 

This is the first post of many where I will examine some of his ‘forgotten’ works, which even today, are lesser-known (though often prolifically recorded), and belie his status as an “old fashioned” composer, or as Stravinsky once accused him, a painter who abandoned fresh watercolors for stale oils.  Hearing this works alongside his more famous music gives us a complex portrait of an artist who continued to grow and evolve, even though his unique musical thumbprint appeared at an early age.  Though he would never be as radical as Schoenberg, or as innovative as Bartok, he offered profound solutions to the question of musical meaning in a disillusioned age.  Rachmaninov’s piano sounds like no one else’s before or since, and his orchestra, though spiced with the aromas of Tchaikovsky and Richard Strauss, finds its own solitary byways that few composers dared—or were able—to follow. 

Symphony No.3: This late, autumnal symphony was largely rejected by both the modernists and the traditionalists when it appeared in 1936.  Modernists, of course, found it another example of his mawkish melodrama, while friends more in sympathy with Rachmaninov, such as the composer-pianist Nikolai Medtner, exclaimed that he had jumped to the modernist’s camp!  The reasons for this confusing critical assessment are not hard to discern: the symphony marries Rachmaninov’s traditional melodies and flow with a growing appreciation for American music, as well as, perhaps, a deeper understanding of Stravinsky’s art.  His orchestration is leaner, more muscular, and yet more inventive than in previous works, such as the gargantuan, and sometimes densely scored Second Symphony.  Chief among his orchestral innovations is his focus on rhythmic elements, which to me suggests allusions to the American scene—jazz and Broadway above all.  The opening movement, however, is most memorable for its sense of overwhelming longing; it has been called his “Exile” symphony, for Rachmaninov had abandoned Russia after the Revolution and was never to return.  He spent his last decades in America, shored up in Southern California along other European ex-pats such as Schoenberg and Stravinsky.  For such a deeply Russian composer (at least in the sense that his music carries a significant national stamp), composing in America must have been a tricky proposition (all the more so in Beverly Hills!). Many attributed his long compositional silence to his exile, though it probably had more to do with an endless round of concert engagements to pay the bills. 

At any rate, the Third Symphony exhibits Rachmaninov at the height of his powers, and like the Second Symphony, it opens with a motto theme that provides material for the entire movement—a haunting tune for 2 clarinets, horn and muted cello, which then explodes into a rhythmic clatter.  This subsides into more typical Rachmaninov, a searching, wistful theme which seems to speak of exile and old Russia (it also slightly resembles a more agitated version of the slow movement of Piano Concerto No.4).  Rachmaninov develops this in many unusual ways, often more typical of his scherzo movements than a first movement.  His use of percussion and rhythmic effects nicely offset his familiar melodic strain, making the movement a refined, subtle, but always provocative masterpiece.  The slow movement is the most interesting movement, as it combines slow movement and scherzo, offering us one of his greatest romantic themes, but not letting it run the show as in the Second Symphony.  A jolly, sardonic march intrudes early on, dominating the movement until the gorgeous theme reasserts itself.  The finale that follows is cut from the same cloth as the opening movement, with boisterous, scherzo-like rhythm occasionally broken up by moments of painful nostalgia.  I honestly feel like this was Rachmaninov’s way of composing in an ‘American’ style without compromising his essential aesthetic.  It is more athletic and lean, yet everything sounds exactly like him.  I truly admire his ability, quite late in life, to unleash a side of him left dormant (to some degree) since his First Symphony, where melody was firmly held in check for symphonic development.  While I wouldn’t say this is necessary better than his more famous Second Symphony, it is surely its equal—and superior for its ability to conform to new styles and be influenced by his adopted homeland. 

I have never heard a bad recorded version of this symphony, though I would recommend the following versions highly: Dutoit with the Philadelphia Symphony, Jansons with the St. Peterburgh Philharmonic, Ashkenazy with the London Symphony, and Ormandy with the Philadelphia (the pioneer recording).