Word: korsakov
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...precisely one: Scott Joplin's underrated Treemonisha, which foreshadowed X's themes of black self-reliance and self- determination by 70 years. In between came the faux noir of Porgy and Bess, which is really a Russian grand opera in blackface (the choral scenes are closer to Rimsky-Korsakov or Mussorgsky than they are to anything Catfish Row ever heard). With a fierce, angry and brilliant libretto by Thulani Davis, the composer's cousin, X is at once a musical entertainment, a folk epic, a cautionary tale and a cri de coeur...
This week at the Met, and in the tour's finale next week at the Wolf Trap festival outside Washington, the Bolshoi will offer two far less familiar works, which are nevertheless as characteristically Russian as the Onegin. One is Rimsky-Korsakov's Mlada, a spectacular combination of opera and ballet, folk fantasy and fairy tale. Mlada is an oddity that played only fitfully after its premiere in 1892 and had disappeared for more than a half-century when the Bolshoi revived it in 1988. "Mlada was a hard test for us," says chief designer Valery Levental, "because nobody knew...
...RIMSKY-KORSAKOV: THREE SYMPHONIES, CAPRICCIO ESPAGNOL, RUSSIAN EASTER FESTIVAL OVERTURE (DG). There is much more to Rimsky than Scheherazade, as Neemi Jarvi and the Gothenburg Symphony prove...
...masters great and small that deserve dusting off. Instead of Dvorak's "New World" Symphony, for example, why not the equally seductive but infrequently heard tone poem, The Wood Dove? Instead of Beethoven's pawky Second Piano Concerto or the overplayed Violin Concerto of Mendelssohn, why not Rimsky-Korsakov's dashing Piano Concerto or Carl Nielsen's melancholic Violin Concerto? Instead of another Brahms' First Symphony, how about Joachim Raff's spooky "Lenore" Symphony, once greatly admired in the 19th century, or Austrian Composer Franz Schmidt's brooding Fourth Symphony, written...
True enough, but there is something more to the T & D magic, and even when they remain at Point A, doing their little trick, it stands out: they are not really two dancers but one. When they move, as to Ravel's Bolero or Rimsky- Korsakov's A Song of India, they move as one, the way that A & R -- Astaire and Rogers -- do on the late show, exuding a sensuality that is more pronounced because it is subdued. "I've never felt sexy in my life," said one elderly woman in the Buffalo audience. "But they make me feel...