Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 4 / Romeo And Juliet

Description

Russian FestivalAram Il'yich Khachaturian (1903 - 1978)Sabre Dance from Gayane Alexander Porfir'yevich Borodin (1833 - 1887)Overture to Prince Igor Reyngol'd Moritsevich Gliere (1875 - 1956)Russian Sailors' Dance Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka (1804 - 1857)Overture to Ruslan & Ludmilla Overture to A Life for the Tsar Fantasie: KamarinskayaNikolay Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov (1844 - 1908)Flight of the Bumblebee Russian Easter Overture It was during the course of the nineteenth century that Russian national consciousness developed, a change in attitude evident in literature, with the great novelists and poets of the period, in the visual arts, which have travelled abroad less satisfactorily, and, above all, in music. Under Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century, Russia had looked to the West, a fact that the geographical choice of capital, St. Petersburg, and the cultural and political life of the time illustrates well enough. In the nineteenth century there were again those who looked West to Germany for a musical model to follow, while others, in particular the so-called Mighty Handful grouped around Balakirev, chose a very different course. The cosmopolitan tendency is clearly seen in the case of Anton Rubinstein, founder of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, an institution that earned the initial hostility of the nationalists, with their inspired amateurism.The Mighty Handful, Balakirev, Cesar Cui, Borodin, Musorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, the most Russian of the Russian composers, were inspired by the example of Glinka to attempt the composition of music of national inspiration. Glinka had had some professional training in Germany and Balakirev too was a professional musician. The other later members of the group, however, had, at first, other careers. Cesar Cui remained a professor of military fortification, Borodin was a noted chemist, teaching at the Medico-Surgical Academy, Musorgsky was an army officer and later an alcoholically incompetent civil servant, while Rimsky-Korsakov. started his career as a naval officer. These preoccupations seem to justify Rubinstein's description of the nationalist composers as amateurs, while the enthusiasm of the Five for things Russian seemed to them to justify their criticism of Rubinstein and the Conservatory as in some way un-Russian, a jibe not without anti-semitic implications.During the course of the century the conservatories established in St. Petersburg and Moscow did provide Russian musicians with the kind of technical proficiency that they needed, enabling later generations to combine sound technical competence with nationalist ideals. Tchaikovsky was among the first students in St. Petersburg, and was later to teach for some ten years at the parallel institution in Moscow. The amateur pioneers, much of whose work was left unfinished, had provided an example and an inspiration. It was left to Rimsky-Korsakov and his young pupil Glazunov to edit and complete compositions undert