Capriccio Espagnol, Op. 34
Russian Easter Festival Overture, Op. 36
Scheherazade, Op. 35 - Symphonic Suite

It was Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov’s older brother, Voin, who first put ideas of travel, ships and the sea into the would-be composer’s head. The young Nikolay had never set foot aboard a boat but Voin’s evocative letters home from the Far East, where he was stationed in the Imperial Russian Navy, proved more than sufficient. Nikolay’s career path looked set even from his childhood bedroom, where he learned nautical terms, rigged-up model ships and practiced tying knots, his mind full of the adventure and romance of seafaring. In 1856, he enrolled as a naval cadet and completed six years of training.

During that time another passion nudged its way into Rimsky’s heart: music. Barely a year into his studies at the naval academy, the young Nikolay saw his first opera. Soon he heard symphonies by Beethoven and Mendelssohn and encountered a piece by his senior Mikhail Glinka, Jota Aragonesa. Even before he embarked on a three-year voyage around the world aboard a clipper, Rimsky knew he wanted to be a composer, not a seaman. Afterwards, having sailed into some of the great ports of the world, he returned home happy never to leave Russia again – the only journeys Rimsky wanted to make were musical.

Rimsky’s orchestral trilogy was completed by a piece that seems, even more than its companions, to look backwards as well as forwards. In his Russian Easter Festival Overture, the composer set out to capture the ‘transition from the gloomy and mysterious evening of Passion Saturday to the unbridled pagan-religious merrymaking on Easter Sunday morning,’ as experienced in a Russian church. Not just any church, but ‘a cathedral thronged with people from every walk of life, and with several priests conducting the service.’

This musical procession from darkness to light smells deliciously of Old Russia. It uses material from the Obikhod (the Russian Orthodox Church’s catalogue of chants), uses bells and contains overt references to four-part ecclesiastical harmony. It is surely orchestrated in the manner of Glinka – the first Russian composer whose music Rimsky had heard, and the forefather of The Mighty Handful. In common with the two other works recorded, it employs a series of miniature cadenzas for the violin. It was first performed on 15 December 1888, not long after it had been composed.

The Overture emerges from the gloom in an unusual 5-in-a-bar gait, with a presentation of the theme ‘Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered.’ Against a glittering curtain of flutes, harps and two violins, a cello then intones the chant ‘An Angel cried out.’ Finally, the chant ‘Christ is risen from the dead’ appears amid the jubilant trumpets of the overture’s final paragraph, not before the two preceding chant themes have been discussed and presented in tantalizingly contrasting orchestrations.

For Rimsky, the overture was about more than the resurrection of Christ. The composer’s childhood home in Tikhvin, Novgorod Province, was surrounded by monasteries (it was also a long way from sea, which doubtless fuelled the young composer’s naval fantasies). On Easter morning, Rimsky would have heard bells ringing out from miles around while experiencing the continuing onset of spring in a landscape hitherto frozen for almost half a year. The Russian Easter Festival Overture could be a manifesto for the composer’s belief in an authentic Russian music, but one facing a bright new dawn.

– Andrew Mellor

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Recorded in Oslo Concert Hall, 25 - 29 May 2019.