Word: korsakov
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Glinka (1804-57) was the father of Russian nationalistic music. To listen to Russlan, composed in 1842, is to hear much that followed in the work of Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, the young Stravinsky, even the Prokofiev of Love for Three Oranges. Russlan is a delicious fairy tale scored with lightness and quick invention. The orchestration confirms accounts of Glinka's thorough knowledge of Mozart and Rossini. His inclusion of Russian folk music, Turkish airs, even the whole-tone scale from the Orient (more than half a century before Debussy) suggests that he was exceptionally curious and open...
Poor old Mussorgsky: Rimsky-Korsakov doctored Boris Godunov almost beyond recognition, Stokowski mauled A Night on Bald Mountain, and now Tomita has repainted Pictures. It is a marvel that the original music has the strength to stand up to this kind of dilution, like a good Scotch to soda. Tomita's Pictures is no threat to Sviatoslav Richter's classic version of Mussorgsky's piano original, or the Toscanini interpretation of the expert Ravel orchestration. What Tomita does is pop art pure and simple. It is benevolent caricature, a funny-paper treatment of the classics for those...
...light of the illuminating new Boris mounted by the Metropolitan last winter (TIME, Dec. 30) and based on Mussorgsky's original version, one can question the Bolshoi's steadfast adherence to the gaudy Rimsky-Korsakov re-orchestration. The Met-Mussorgsky rendering makes Boris the protagonist in a true psychological drama; the Bol-shoi-Rimsky production, virtually unchanged for 28 years, makes him more the central figure in a historical pageant. His fellow 17th century Russians emerge, as it were, frieze-dried...
...Richard Strauss what Engelbert Humperdinck (Hansel und Gretel) was to Wagner-a brilliant but minor follower. The style of Die Tote Stadt is a lush, clamorous, occasionally schmaltzy orchestral sonorama that lies somewhere between Der Rosenkavalier and Elektra, with special added effects from Puccini, Debussy, Mahler and Rimsky-Korsakov. The best of its vocal moments, like the taunting Marietta's Lied, sound like pure Franz Lehár, the master of popular Viennese operetta...
Incredible Soul. Rimsky-Korsakov was one of the master orchestrators of the post-romantic era. He revised Boris at the turn of the century in the conviction that while Mussorgsky's writing had undeniable boldness, originality and even beauty, it was also rough of harmony, incoherent of style and in general not the work of a professional. In truth, Mussorgsky, a civil service clerk, had little formal training but did possess, as Schippers puts it, "an incredible soul, obviously. It had to come out." Rimsky's rich, opulent revision swept the operatic world, with the great Russian basso...