Thursday 19 April 2012

Chopin list



On the stage of Paris’s Théâtre du Châtelet in June 1909 were Vaslav Nijinsky in a rather unbecoming orangey-blond wig and attendant ethereal creatures including Tamara Karsavina and Alicia Pavlova. Down in the pit the orchestra played the joint creative input of six musical minds, colliding in a pretty mélange of sorts. Since three of them – Chopin, Stravinsky and Glazunov – are to meet in the Royal Ballet’s triple bill of A Month in the Country, A Birthday Offering and Les noces next month, and I needed to knit them together somehow in a programme article, the premiere of Les sylphides seemed like a very good place to start.

Digging out the whys and wherefores made me realize what a complex musical history this more or less plotless ballet, with its romantic poet flanked by long-tutued sylphs, has had. Not only does it tend to be most often performed, when it is performed at all, in Roy Douglas’s arrangement, but since the Russians other orchestrators have included Maurice Ravel in 1914* and Benjamin Britten, in a 1940 effort for an American ballet company sadly lost (and the editors of Britten’s letters must be believed on this, rather than Richard Taruskin, who claims the orchestration to be ‘in current use’. I wish it were).

So I thought as a kind of fridge-magnet memo to self I would attempt as un-drily as I could to list the path to the 1909 Les sylphides. Volume One of Taruskin’s Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions was a huge help, with detail from Lynn Garafola’s Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.


Glazunov kicked off in 1892 with his orchestral suite Chopiniana, presumably inspired by what Tchaikovsky had done with Mozart piano pieces + the motet ‘Ave verum corpus’ Lisztified in his Suite No. 4. The four pieces in Chopiniana – none of them, note, used in Les sylphides – were the 'Military' Polonaise, Op. 40 No. 1; the Nocturne in F, Op. 15 No. 1; the Mazurka in C sharp minor, Op. 50 No. 3;  and the Tarantelle, Op. 43.


In 1907 Mikhail Fokine – pictured above two years earlier in costume for Paquita – choreographed Chopiniana for the Mariinsky. He asked Glazunov to make an additional orchestration of the C sharp minor Waltz, Op. 64 No. 2 with a bit of the Op. 25 No. 7 Etude to preface it. The waltz did of course survive into the Diaghilev-managed Les sylphides.

Chopiniana the ballet showcased national as well as classical dances – Warsaw ballroom style for the Polonaise, Capri-based folk dance for the Tarantella. That had little in common with Les sylphides. But the music and choreography for Fokine’s second Chopiniana ballet, entitled Grand Pas to Music by Chopin, certainly did. This retained only the C sharp minor Waltz and placed it alongside the six other numbers we know from Les sylphides (I'm getting opus fatigue now, and I'm sure you are, so we'll leave it at that until Stravinsky's contribution pops up).


 When Diaghilev turned to ‘the second Chopiniana’ for his Ballets Russes’ first appearance in the Parisian ‘Saison Russe’ of 1909, he clearly didn’t think much of its arrangements other than Glazunov’s; the rest had been hastily done by a répétiteur at the Mariinsky, Maurice Keller. So Diaghilev turned to Lyadov, Taneyev, Nikolay Tcherepnin and...the 26 year old Igor Stravinsky, who at the beginning of 1909 impressed him with his orchestral showpiece the Scherzo fantastique. I’ve not been able to trace the other arrangements, but Stravinsky’s not especially flavoursome yet historically fascinating versions of the Nocturne in A flat, Op. 32. No. 2 and the Grande Valse brillante, Op. 28 appear in rather poor sound – and with visuals you fortunately don't need to watch – via a performance from Sakari Oramo and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Don't ask me why there's a snippet of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto at the start, but don't readjust your sets - it quickly vanishes.


Which provides an excuse very belatedly to congratulate Oramo on his appointment as principal conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, taking up the baton in September. That fabulous Bax/Saariaho/Sibelius concert which was definitely one of the highs of 2011 clearly had its impact - and looking back at the associated blog post, I see there was speculation in the comments about who would take over the reins at the BBCSO. One thing I didn't know at the time was that it was the first occasion on which Oramo had conducted a London orchestra.

And while sounding the BBC note, fullish details of the works at the 2012 Proms (though minus artists) are here on the Arts Desk and here on the BBC Proms website, less easy to take in at once. All I’ll say is that there must be something there to satisfy everyone, and that if another Beethoven symphonies cycle would usually send me diving for cover, the fact that it comes from Barenboim and his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra is a real coup for the world's biggest music festival.

*this added in the light of Shin-ichi Numabe's comment below.

13 comments:

Susan Scheid said...

I have more to say than this, must spend some time Over Here, but jumping into say: Oramo? He whose missus sang Luonnotar? I've been saying a propos the Big Premiere at Cabrillo this August that I'm on the wrong coast, but now I have to say that it seems I'm on the wrong continent as well! More anon . . .

David said...

That's the one. He did marvellous things with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra - I remember a stunning Nielsen Five at the Proms, wish I'd been able to go up to Brum more - which tend to have been a bit overshadowed by both Rattle and Nelsons. But his choice of rep old and new will be just right for the BBCSO, and that Sibelius Third was such a high watermark. Expect the Komsi sisters, too...

John said...

Love that image of Nijinsky - never seen one of him as the poet in Les Sylphides.

David said...

I confess it was the first Sylphides image that cropped up on Wiki Commons. From The Art of Nijinsky By Geoffrey Arundel Whitworth published in 1913, with illustrations by Dorothy Mullock (presumably from life, since the great dancer gave freely of his time for the book). The whole thing can be read online courtesy of Cornell University Library's online archive.

Shin-ichi Numabe said...

Welcome back, David! I'm very much delighted to hear from you!

As regard "Les Sylphides", do not forget to mention another version orchestrated by Maurice Ravel. Nijinsky himself commissioned it. After the dismissal from Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, Nijinsky organized his own small-scale company and performed it several times at the Palace Theatre in London in spring 1914. Ravel's new version (regrettably now lost) was premiered there. Motoo Ohtaguro, a young Japanese music lover, fortunately attended twice and wrote the impression as follows: "Ravel's new orchestration seems to me very cool and atmospheric. It includes different pieces from Fokine's; such as Nocturne op.9-3 and Etude op.10-11, which are very much suited to the moonlit delicacy of Nijinsky's choreography".

David said...

Well I never, Shin-ichi: neither of my Ravel volumes (slim ones by his friend Roland-Manuel and ed. Roger Nichols) mentions it, though I see it crops up in Orenstein and the Cambridge Companion. How disastrous that the score was either thrown out or thieved from Bronislava Nijinska. I imagine that would have been THE peerless arrangement from the composer of the Valses nobles et sentimentales. Ohtaguro is a familiar name from the Prokofiev perspective, of course. Thanks for enlightening me.

Gavin Plumley said...

The Taruskin is amazing for putting the beginning of the Ballets Russes enterprise in context. I was thinking it about it the other day when writing about Schumann's Carnaval, which fits so deftly with the emerging aesthetic of the company. Look forward to reading your piece, as ever.

David said...

Indeed, Gavin, who else would have ferretted out the finer details of Life Before Diaghilev so assiduously? It's a fine read, too. Good to hear from you.

David Damant said...

In the original Kobbe ( don't know how far the phrase has survived Harewood et al) and in the description of Wagner's arrangements at Bayreuth, Kobbe said that the long intervals allowed for "the more mundane pleasures of the table". Just the attitude that results in a lack of appreciation of food as a fine art, in Germany as in England. Anyway, Pavlova (the name as in ballet prompts me) is a plate shaped and soft interior meringue, with cream and then fruit on top. Super if the meringue is right. Extraordinarily, invented in New Zealand !

David said...

You may like to know that our birthday guest's daughter on Wednesday at Langan's Brasserie - their choice, wouldn't be mine, very mired in 1970s Brit approach to food - chose a pavlova: discarded the strawberries, which I ate, and added more cream...

Susan Scheid said...

What an incredible back-story to this piece! As for Taruskin, I'm trying to restrain myself from adding yet another weighty tome to my already impossible reading list, but I have to say, while the technical detail is likely to be far beyond me, I'm intrigued. Taruskin became a hero for me when I started on my contemporary classical music quest. It was his comment in The Poietic Fallacy that “promoting [the twelve-tone system] into a primary musical value is the ultimate poietic fallacy, the one that led modern music into the cul-de-sac where absurdly overcomposed monstrosities by Elliot Carter or Milton Babbitt have been reverently praised by critics and turned into obligatory models for emulation by teachers of composition.” I hardly knew what he was talking about, but I nonetheless thought, thank God! I’m not alone!

I’ve strayed a bit here, haven’t I? Back to your post: when I listened to the Stravinsky, I thought again, as I often do, how I wish I understood a little bit about what makes an arrangement/orchestration work, or not. I thought of your comment, “not especially flavorsome.” Stravinsky’s did feel a little dull to me, and I wondered, who might lift up the music more? The answer, of course, is in the comments: Ravel! I would have loved to be able to hear that one side-by-side with this and compare. What a shame it’s never to be.

So, back to the comments—the pavlova reminds me of my grandfather’s (hand-whipped) schaumtorten, though he used raspberries for his. Ambrosial, or at least I thought so then.

David said...

'Absurdly overcomposed' - that's Carter all over for me: I just don't get the point of him and never will. It's interesting, isn't it, that we're now entering another dangerous era - where the triad which had so disappeared under serial structures is at risk of being boringly applied again.

Ravel - yes, I meant to add that for me he is THE greatest orchestrator of all time. I'd say Berlioz was equal, but of course couldn't take advantage of the early 20th century's expanded orchestral palette.

Susan Scheid said...

Or even the single note C, perchance (read: Terry Riley's In C)? Your comment to my comment contains enough food for thought to last a year--and this is all the more so as I've just added another trip to my calendar (!--my retirement menu is going to be rice and beans at this rate), about which I'll be posting something later next week.

Footnote: You made a comment about the underworld that makes me think you might have had a dose of what I call the witches' brew (or several doses). No need to remark further on this, but, if so, just to say, been there, done that, too, and it's no day at the beach, innit?