Yesterday’s article about the sixteenth CD in the latest BBC Legends release cited Gennady Rozhdestvensky serving as conductor for two concerto performances by cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. Rozhdestvensky takes “center stage” on the seventeenth CD in the collection, performing ballet music by three composers with Russian roots with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The selections are presented in chronological order, beginning with the music for the second act of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 71 ballet The Nutcracker. This is followed by four of the eight movements from the Opus 27a suite that Dmitri Shostakovich extracted from his Opus 27 ballet The Bolt, completed in 1931. The final selection is the suite Scènes de ballet, which Igor Stravinsky composed in 1944, about five years after his move to the United States.
Only the Shostakovich music was unfamiliar to me. The libretto for the complete ballet was created by Victor Smirnov, and it is an unabashedly satirical narrative about a Soviet factory and an attempt to sabotage it by throwing a bolt into the machinery. The ballet was first performed on April 8, 1931, a time when Shostakovich could still get away with poking fun at Soviet bureaucracy. However, following that premiere, it was not performed again until 2005, when such pranks could be executed with impunity!
Sadly, Rozhdestvensky’s excerpts do little to inform us about either the scenario or how the music facilitates the advance of that scenario. Indeed, the order in which those four movements are performed is not the same as their ordering in the ballet itself. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that Rozhdestvensky performed this selection on August 18, 1987, after the rise of glasnost and the perestroika movement initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev. In other words it was safe to poke fun at authority again! Regrettably, by the time this music was performed in London, Shostakovich had been dead for over ten years.
My awareness of Scènes de ballet goes all the way back to one of the first long-playing records that my parents purchased. It was on the “flip side” of one of the many suites that Stravinsky had extracted from his “Petrushka” ballet. I found the dissonances that disrupted the opening D major chord to be disturbing, if not downright scary; and it took me at least a decade to get used to what Stravinsky was trying to do with his opening gesture.
The ballet was originally performed as part of a revue entitled The Seven Lively Arts. The choreographer was Anton Dolin, who also shared the lead with Alicia Markova. I never saw that choreography performed, but Samuel Kurkjian created his own choreography for a performance by the Boston Ballet when I was first exercising my writing chops by writing about dance. Other versions were created by Frederick Ashton, John Taras, and Christopher Wheeldon.
Under Rozhdestvensky’s baton, on the other hand, Scènes de ballet stands up as instrumental music in its own right. The same can be said about the Tchaikovsky selection. Almost everyone tends to know about the suite that was extracted from the original two-act ballet. Not everyone may know that all but two of the movements of that suite can be found in the second act of the complete ballet, and most of them contribute to a divertissement at that heart of that act. Thus, Rozhdestvensky basically prepared a concert offering that would allow listeners to experience some of their best-loved pieces in a new context. Ironically, the Tchaikovsky selection was performed at the same concert that offered the Shostakovich excerpts, providing “back-to-back” opportunities to listen to ballet music without thinking about the ballets themselves. (Scènes de ballet, on the other hand, was performed on April 29, 1981.)
Thus, one may say that the seventeenth CD in the BBC Legends provides the attentive listener with ballet music without the dancing.
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