Spanish Festival

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SpanishFestival Volume 1MikhailIvanovich Glinka (1804 - 1857) Capriccio brillante on the Jota aragonesa SummerNight in MadridNikolayAndreyevlch Rimsky-Korsakov (1844 - 1908) Capriccioespagnol, Opus 34EmmanuelChabrier (1841 - 1894) EspanaEdwardElgar (1857 - 1934) Sevillana,Opus 7 JulesMassenet (1842 - 1912) Balletmusic from Le Cid Sevillanafrom Don Cesar de BazanSpainexercised a curious fascination over the nationalist composers of the nineteenth century,with a particular appeal in Russia, a country that was finding again its own identity inliterature and music, after the Westernisation initiated by Peter the Great.MikhailIvanovich Glinka was a pioneer of Russian musical nationalism. He was born on the familyestate near Smolensk in 1804 and spent much of his childhood in the care of his paternalgrandmother, a woman whose care for him effectively undermined his health, which mighthave improved with a breath of fresh air. In 1810, when his grandmother died, he returnedto his parents and began to widen his musical experience, which up to that time had beenlargely of folk-music. Further musical opportunities occurred at school in St. Petersburg,where he had a few lessons from John Field and played to the Bratislava virtuoso Hummel,to his approval. He was later to avoid serious employment and to devote himself to music,improving his abilities as a composer by study in Italy and in Germany.Glinka'sfirst real achievement was in the creation of a genuinely Russian opera, A Life for theTsar, which he completed in 1836. Ruslan and Lyudmila, completed six years later, wasrather less successful at first, although it was gradually to win acceptance. It was withsome idea of composing a Spanish opera that in 1845 Glinka went to Spain. The result wasnot an opera but the first of his so-called SpanishOvertures, the Capriccio brillante on the Aragonese dance, the iota, a work inthe structure of sonata form. A second Spanish Overture was to follow in 1848, when hisapplication for a passport to Paris had been refused and he found himself obliged to spendthe winter in Warsaw. Making use of material he had gathered in Spain, he wrote the Recuerdos de Castilla, later revising it as Souvenir d'une nuit d'ete a Madrid. The piece isbased on four Spanish folk-tunes, varied and expanded.Rimsky-Korsakov'sfamous Capriccio espagnol began as aFantasia on Spanish Themes for violin and orchestra, but was eventually completed in 1887in its present form. Rimsky-Korsakov belonged to the musical generation after Glinka andonce he had relinquished his original career as a naval officer devoted himself to thecause of Russian music with a professionalism that some of his contemporaries lacked. Hewas one of the five nationalist composers, Stasov's MightyHandful, under the influence of Balakirev, and possessed particular ability inorchestration, a gift he was later to exercise in removing apparent crudities from themusic of Musorgsky and in completing what Borodin had left undone. He stres