Day 31
Balakirev King Lear Overture
Singapore Symphony Orchestra
Choo Hoey
A busy day today so only time for a short piece.
I have heard a few bits and pieces of Balakirev over the years - the second symphony and Islamey - but nothing has really stuck in the mind. I do recall that one of my lecturers at University had studied Balakirev and remember her pointing out some deficiencies in his technique - he had not been able to notate properly what he obviously intended in a piano postlude to a song.
Balakirev wrote incidental music to King Lear but I only had a recording of the overture. Hearing it blind I think that I might have thought the introduction was by Weber or perhaps the young Wagner. But later on there was much more of a Russian feel to the music and at times it did sound a bit like proto-Tchaikovsky. There were some interesting orchestral effects as well as one or two oddities - a whole string of bottom A’s for the bassoon which I think must have stemmed from a misunderstanding and some very strange doubling of the cor anglais and the clarinet which didn’t really work. The quiet end was effective. Balakirev had an important place in Russian music as a mentor to other composers which in the end was probably had a greater long term significance that his own achievements as a composer. Crucially it was him that persuaded Tchaikovsky to write the Romeo and Juliet overture, indeed dictating to him the form and even the key structure. But Tchaikovsky’s music is on another plane altogether - the difference between talent and genius.
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