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.