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LEOPOLD STOKOWSKI
and his Symphony Orchestra
MUSSORGSKY: A Night on Bare Mountain
RIMSKY-KORSAKOV: Russian Eastre Festival Overture
GLIÈRE: Russian Sailor's Dance
TCHAIKOVSKY: Polonaise from Eugene Onegin
BORODIN: In The Steps of Central Asia
Dances of the Polovetzki Maidens
Stokowski often remarked how intensely he felt Slavic music and over the decades, particularly during his tenure with the Philadelphia Orchestra, he championed the compositions of many living Russian composers - Rachmaninov, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khatchaturian and others - and also frequently performed the music of their predecessors. All but two of the Russian works on this CD come from an LP for which Stokowski himself provided the notes. This commenced with his own edition of Mussorgsky's A Night on Bare Mountain CD, an imaginative re-working of Rimsky-Korsakov's score that was visually depicted to great effect in Walt Disney's Fantasia. Stokowski highlighted the music's fantastical elements with brilliant orchestral effects and wrote: “My aim has been to express Mussorgsky's original conception of demoniac fury and sinister darkness, contrasted with the sweetness and purity of the early morning which follows. As the satanic frenzy of the witches' dance reaches its climax, a ray of early morning light disperses the evil spirits, a bell is heard from a distant monastery, a bird sings of the fresh morning, a peasant's song answers from the valley below, and the sun rises.”
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© 2007 Edward Johnson
