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calimacSent off a couple days ago a CD, mostly non-classical, to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
barondave that I was inspired to create by his for me; and also made a purely classical one for myself.
No work in the standard classical repertoire is harder to pin down than Aram Khachaturian's ballet Gayne. For one thing, how do you spell it in the Latin alphabet? Is it Gayne, Gaiane, Gayane, Gayaneh, or something else?
For another, though Khachaturian extracted a few suites from it at one time or another, there is no standard "Gayne Suite" the way there is a "Nutcracker Suite." Most conductors recording excerpts from Gayne make their own selection, which is likely to differ from the next conductor's.
Most seriously, there's no standard score for the work. The plot of the ballet kept being revised to keep up with the latest precepts of Socialist Realism, and unfortunately that led to changes in the music as well. Between its premiere in 1942 and his death in 1978, Khachaturian made several major revisions, in the process excising some of his best music and replacing it with something else. Many conductors revert to the 1942 version, but I have here a disk from Naxos titled "Gayane Suites Nos. 1-3" (André Anichanov, St. Petersburg State Symphony Orchestra, typical hollow Russian recording sound) which, though it doesn't say so clearly, is from a revised version. Its 17 numbers include the Sabre Dance and Gayne's Adagio, all right - it wouldn’t be Gayne without them - but there's no trace of such other famous numbers as the Lezghinka, or my three favorites, Noune's Variation, the Dance of the Young Kurds, and the Dance of the Rose Maidens (also called the Dance of the Young Maidens - they were expecting old maidens?). Consumer beware! The one thing I like about this version is the very effective re-scoring of the Adagio for a cut-down orchestra.
I picked up an RCA set (Loris Tjeknavorian, National Philharmonic) with a nearly complete recording of the 1942 version, but it spreads out over two discs, including a lot of stuff I don't care for; and unfortunately the performance is not always the best. What I wanted was my own custom-made Gayne suite, and with my CD maker and a little aid from two recordings of excerpts (Yuri Temirkanov, Royal Philharmonic, lively but sometimes terminally eccentric; and Neeme Järvi, Scottish National Orchestra, good in the slow parts but sluggish in the fast ones, as if the musicians couldn't quite keep up with the conductor), I did just that: my favorite parts of Gayne, in the order I wanted them, including numbers like the Dance of Welcome which never show up in the excerpts, and cherry-picking the best performance of pieces that were on more than one recording. For the Sabre Dance and the Dance of the Rose Maidens I couldn't decide which performance was best, so I put them all on, in a row. Hey, this is my CD, so I can do what I want.
At one time all I knew of Gayne was the Sabre Dance and the Adagio (which is the quiet string music heard in the scenes introducing the spaceship Discovery in 2001), and wondered what they were doing in the same work. I was delighted to find so many other catchy dances. Gayne appeals to my musical hindbrain, the part that started out listening to light classics and doesn't care about structure or thematic development. This music is all rhythm and melody: as with most ballets, the dances exist on stable harmonic platforms. That’s what Khachaturian does best, and we should leave him to it.
barondave that I was inspired to create by his for me; and also made a purely classical one for myself.No work in the standard classical repertoire is harder to pin down than Aram Khachaturian's ballet Gayne. For one thing, how do you spell it in the Latin alphabet? Is it Gayne, Gaiane, Gayane, Gayaneh, or something else?
For another, though Khachaturian extracted a few suites from it at one time or another, there is no standard "Gayne Suite" the way there is a "Nutcracker Suite." Most conductors recording excerpts from Gayne make their own selection, which is likely to differ from the next conductor's.
Most seriously, there's no standard score for the work. The plot of the ballet kept being revised to keep up with the latest precepts of Socialist Realism, and unfortunately that led to changes in the music as well. Between its premiere in 1942 and his death in 1978, Khachaturian made several major revisions, in the process excising some of his best music and replacing it with something else. Many conductors revert to the 1942 version, but I have here a disk from Naxos titled "Gayane Suites Nos. 1-3" (André Anichanov, St. Petersburg State Symphony Orchestra, typical hollow Russian recording sound) which, though it doesn't say so clearly, is from a revised version. Its 17 numbers include the Sabre Dance and Gayne's Adagio, all right - it wouldn’t be Gayne without them - but there's no trace of such other famous numbers as the Lezghinka, or my three favorites, Noune's Variation, the Dance of the Young Kurds, and the Dance of the Rose Maidens (also called the Dance of the Young Maidens - they were expecting old maidens?). Consumer beware! The one thing I like about this version is the very effective re-scoring of the Adagio for a cut-down orchestra.
I picked up an RCA set (Loris Tjeknavorian, National Philharmonic) with a nearly complete recording of the 1942 version, but it spreads out over two discs, including a lot of stuff I don't care for; and unfortunately the performance is not always the best. What I wanted was my own custom-made Gayne suite, and with my CD maker and a little aid from two recordings of excerpts (Yuri Temirkanov, Royal Philharmonic, lively but sometimes terminally eccentric; and Neeme Järvi, Scottish National Orchestra, good in the slow parts but sluggish in the fast ones, as if the musicians couldn't quite keep up with the conductor), I did just that: my favorite parts of Gayne, in the order I wanted them, including numbers like the Dance of Welcome which never show up in the excerpts, and cherry-picking the best performance of pieces that were on more than one recording. For the Sabre Dance and the Dance of the Rose Maidens I couldn't decide which performance was best, so I put them all on, in a row. Hey, this is my CD, so I can do what I want.
At one time all I knew of Gayne was the Sabre Dance and the Adagio (which is the quiet string music heard in the scenes introducing the spaceship Discovery in 2001), and wondered what they were doing in the same work. I was delighted to find so many other catchy dances. Gayne appeals to my musical hindbrain, the part that started out listening to light classics and doesn't care about structure or thematic development. This music is all rhythm and melody: as with most ballets, the dances exist on stable harmonic platforms. That’s what Khachaturian does best, and we should leave him to it.
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Reverberations
Date: 2007-01-25 09:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-25 09:06 pm (UTC)