Salomon Past Concerts

Tuesday 23rd May 2006 at St John's Smith Square

Conductor Dominic Wheeler

Leader Anna Ritchie

Ravel La Valse

Falla El amor brujo

Rimsky-Korsakov Scheherazade

Ravel may seem to have more in common with Manuel de Falla than Rimsky-Korsakov. Ravel’s mother was Basque – she met his father at Aranjuez while he was working on a railway project for the Spanish government – and in 1907 Falla joined the intellectual and cultural ‘Club des Apaches’ in Paris in which Ravel was prominent. However Ravel shared with Rimsky Korsakov a love of fantasy and an interest in the East, and his vivid orchestral colours were very much influenced by him.

La Valse is full of colour, but written after the first world war it has a dark hue. Originally titled 'Wien' the setting is a ballroom in Imperial Vienna of 1855. A veil gradually lifts revealing waltzing couples and a woman in white who is fascinated and horrified by the uninvited figure of death. The waltzing gets progressively more frenetic, until it disintegrates in chaos. It is easy to imagine the Viennese court consumed by internal affairs, ignoring the rumblings of impending world war, until the final chords sounding like gunshots brutally signify doom, and for Ravel the death of the belle époque.

Manuel de Falla was possibly the most important Spanish composer of recent times. Paul Dukas called Falla a ‘petit espagnol tout noir’, and El amor brujo, often translated as ‘Love, the Magician’, has lovers facing a night of sorcery before morning bells peal for a new dawn. Three scenes, in a style derived from Andalusian folk songs, have a mezzo-soprano singing of the cruelty deceptions of love. Other scenes include the well known "Dance of Terror" and "Ritual Fire Dance".

The stories of ‘Alf Layla wa-Layla’, or a ‘Thousand Nights and a Night’ implying something that goes on forever, is the inspiration for Rimsky-Korsakov’s 1888 Suite symphonique pour Orchestre. The original story has Shahryar, king of an unnamed island between India and China, issuing a decree to have his brides executed after one night following his first wife’s infidelity. Shahrazad (known in English as Scheherazade) volunteers to become his next wife, with her plan to stop a breath-taking story each night with a cliff-hanger needing resolution the following night. After she bears the king 3 sons he regains his belief in faithfulness and revokes the decree.

Scheherazade is depicted on solo violin, binding together the unconnected episodes of ‘The sea and Sinbad’s ship’, ‘The story of the prince-kalandar’, ‘The young prince and the princess’ and ‘Festival in Baghdad/The sea/The ship breaks up against a cliff surmounted by a bronze horseman/Conclusion’.

Rimsky-Korsakov said of the titles of the movements: “In composing Scheherazade I meant these hints to direct but slightly the listener’s fancy on the path that my own fancy had travelled and to leave the more minute and particular conceptions to the will and mood of each listener. All I desired was that the listener, if he liked my piece as symphonic music, should carry away the impression that it is, beyond doubt, an oriental narrative of some numerous and varied fairy-tale wonders.”

©Salomon Orchestra

2006

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