Introduction

It is a great privilege for me to start this year together with the CBSO presenting a special programme that celebrates the composer Rheingold Glière and two of his distinguished students.

Glière was an outstanding composer and a great teacher of composition whose life and music are profoundly related to Ukraine and Ukrainian culture. His concerto for coloratura soprano is a very unusually creative piece for the high female voice, very rich on beautiful melodies that also requires high virtuoso capacities from
the soloist.

Borys Lyatoshynsky, one of Glière’s most beloved students, is probably Ukraine’s most important composer of the 20th century, his music is deeply rooted in Ukrainian culture and tradition. The Romeo and Juliet suite was put together by the composer himself using the music that was originally composed to accompany the Shakespeare’s theatre play. I have actually never conducted the Romeo and Juliet by Lyatoshynsky, so I’m hugely looking forward to that.

Rheingold Glière was also Prokofiev’s first composition teacher. He met young Prokofiev at his birthplace in the village Sontsovka in the Donbass region of Ukraine where he was invited to provide Sergei Prokofiev's first composition lessons.

Glière immediately understood that he was dealing with a child prodigy and masterly developed his great talent and provided him the necessary skills for his future development as a musician, which later made Prokofiev become one of the greatest composers of the past century.

All three composers in the programme are extremely dear to me. Among the strong connection between themselves, I also have a personal link to them as my father (a famous Ukrainian composer, Ivan Karabits) was a student of Lyatoshynsky and was born in Donbass, very near to the place where Prokofiev was born. Glière was an extremely important personality in the music life of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, where I was born, because of his musical heritage and his role as Director of the Tchaikovsky National Music Academy, where I studied.

I face the challenge of preparing this programme so that both the Romeo and Juliet suites sound in a very different way, but I really look forward to championing these three Ukrainian composers.

Kirill Karabits
Conductor

Programme Notes

This programme showcases a fabulously rich heritage of Ukrainian musicians: from conductor Kirill Karabits, to Lyatoshinsky, who studied with Glière, who taught Prokofiev! Experience this astonishing wealth of talent with an unusual concerto for voice (the amazing Jennifer France scales its dramatic heights) and two colourful treatments of Romeo and Juliet.

Romeo and Juliet

Borys Lyatoshynsky (1895-1968)

Borys Lyatoshinsky was a hugely significant figure in Ukrainian music in the twentieth century. He was born in Zhytomyr in the north-west of the country and was educated at Kyiv Conservatoire, taking lessons from fellow Ukrainian Rheingold Glière. He taught at the Conservatoire from 1919 until the end of his life, and later served for two years as a board member of the Ukrainian Composers’ Union. He principally wrote chamber music as a young man, but after World War II concentrated on large-scale orchestral works, including this imaginative and colourful Suite based on Romeo and Juliet. Listeners may be surprised to learn it was composed in 1955 given its (relatively) conventional sound world. But Lyatoshinsky’s playful, adventurous orchestrations give it away as a modern work, notably in the imaginative opening movement and in the highly atmospheric ‘Juliet’s Garden’.

The Suite – which clearly favours Juliet’s side of the story - begins with a thorough-going tour of each orchestral section. It opens in a jaunty style, with sprightly woodwind and occasional interjections from the strings, followed by a more assertive passage for low brass. The orchestra then divides the material up, almost bar-by-bar, across every section, creating a beguiling patchwork effect. The next movement is a stately ‘Pavane’, with an opening chorale (somewhat resembling the hymn tune ‘All people that on earth do dwell’) initially in brass, then followed by delicate, ornamental variations. A pulsing side-drum keeps the rhythm throughout.

‘Juliet’s Garden’ initially comprises a series of haunting melodies for solos or small groups of instruments, playing out over a shivering viola figure. Soaring violins begin to take the spotlight, leading a full-blooded surge for the whole ensemble. More introverted solos return, before a somewhat eerie close for high strings and bells. Juliet’s cousin Tybalt and Romeo’s friend Mercutio face off in a swift, fiery dual in the next section, dominated by whirling strings and menacing trombones. The next two movements are sepulchral and suitably sombre as Juliet is carried to the Capulet’s crypt. Finally, the Suite closes with its ‘Apotheosis’, perhaps a tribute to Tchaikovsky (who used the term, meaning ‘culmination’, in two of his ballet suite). In the final moments, a stirring chorale plays out over sparkling strings, then Lyatoshinsky reminds us yet again that we are in 1955, with the repetition of a chord that seems straight out of a jazz playbook. The Suite ends on an optimistic, rather than tragic note.

Concerto for Colaratura Soprano

Rheingold Glière (1875-1956)

This Concerto for voice is a fascinating meeting place of several genres. It was composed in 1943 for the fabulously-named Russian operatic soprano Deborah Yakovlevna Pantofel-Nechetskaya, presumably to showcase her agile and high-lying voice; she was known for her starring roles in Italian opera and for performing stratospherically high concert pieces such as Alyabev’s ‘The Nightingale’. The Concerto also, of course, belongs to its own genre, that of orchestral works featuring a soloist – nearly always an instrument. Glière himself wrote several, including one for harp and two for violin (the second of which was completed by Lyatoshinsky after Glière’s death). Finally, it belongs to the small but distinctive group of compositions known as ‘Vocalises’: wordless ‘songs’ for (nearly always) female voice, which attracted several twentieth century composers, including Rachmaninoff, Ravel, Messiaen and Vaughan Williams.

Glière’s Concerto has been described as a ‘cult classic,’ a term often used for boundary-busting, unconventional works. It is in two movements: the first, after a somewhat theatrical opening, is lyrical with a very winning central theme among its vocal ornamentation; the second is a whirling waltz, building to a dramatic trill on a high C as its penultimate gesture. The work, like the Lyatoshinsky piece, does not really acknowledge the fast-moving developments of classical music in the 1940s, but is a perfect example of the Kyiv-born composer’s melodic gifts as well as his evident adoration of the coloratura voice.

Selections from Romeo and Juliet

Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)

We have Glière to thank for the formative musical education of Prokofiev as well as Lyatoshinsky. Prokofiev was born in Sontsovka, part of the Russian Empire at the time, but now in the Donetsk region of Ukraine; Glière visited the region several times, and gave the very young Prokofiev composition lessons (ambitious from an early age, Prokofiev attempted a symphony when he was 11 years old). Prokofiev later left Russia, not long after the 1917 Revolution, travelling to the USA, then Paris, before settling for a while in Bavaria, and achieving great success with such works as his opera For the Love of Three Oranges. He returned to Russia in 1936, a move which appeared to give him wings: he wrote the famous Peter and the Wolf, an elaborate film score for Sergei Eisenstein and a series of weighty piano sonatas in his first few years back, along with music for a new ballet, Romeo and Juliet.

The score was initially deemed far too complicated by ballet directors, as well as impractically quiet for the dancers in places (to which Prokofiev responded ‘Take it or leave it….You want drums not music!’) and ultimately was rejected. The composer pragmatically – and cleverly – adapted the score into a series of concert suites which became immensely popular, and caused the Kirov and the Bolshoi companies not only to rethink but compete with each other for the premiere. The Kirov eventually staged it in 1940.

Several of the numbers have become famous in their own right in the intervening decades, particularly the aggressively prowling ‘The Montagues and Capulets’. Its brass-heavy swagger is interspersed with delicate, if eerie, passages for woodwind and muted violas. The adolescent Juliet is depicted by, alternately, breathless, rushing strings and a sweetly lyrical melody in the woodwind. The unfortunate Friar Laurence, by contrast, is given a stately, but ponderous theme. The Dance which follows is, on the surface, joyful and light; but Prokofiev’s curdled harmony and flashes of dissonance give it a noticeably edgy quality. Romeo and Juliet are dreamily, and increasingly passionately romantic before parting, in the longest movement here. It builds upon Romeo’s ‘love’ theme, but – as with the dance – is tinged with a more ominous mood. The ‘Dance of the Maids from the Antilles’ appears towards the end of the ballet; the ‘maids’ are Juliet’s bridesmaids, intending to dance at her wedding, but her family finds her lifeless in bed. While ‘dance-like’ in its lightness, the music is undercut by sinister low clarinets and a brooding minor key. Finally, Romeo laments by Juliet’s grave in the searing last movement which harks back, very poignantly, to the theme of ‘Before Parting’.

© Lucy Walker 2024