Word: korsakov
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...strangest case histories in the literature of music. Composed in 1874, it was until last year known to the world only in a prettified version as unlike that of the original as if Murillo had painted over an El Greco, as if Tennyson had rewritten William Blake. Rimsky-Korsakov, good friend of Moussorgsky, composer of Sheherazade, La Coq d'Or and Sadko, professor and purist, had been the one to perform this doubtful service for Boris. He ironed out the harshnesses, modified the harmonies, polished the scoring. Moussorgsky's way of writing music, he said, "was the bumptiousness...
...Metropolitan's Boris, critics have complained, is Chaliapin with accompaniments. Moussorgsky's stark music is played in the prettied version of Rimsky-Korsakov. The chorus, the cast all save Chaliapin, sing in Italian. He, proudly a Russian, sings the language in which Boris was written, the language of the down trodden peasants. Being Chaliapin, the greatest of living singing-actors, he dominated last week as always...
Great Russian writers are Gogol, Tolstoy, Turgeniev, Dostoievsky-products all of the first days when Russia dared declare herself artistically, when French frippery first seemed foolish and the longings of the Slavic soul important. Great Russian composers are Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, Moussorgsky. They too with Glinka. Balakirev and Cui were pioneers in the school of realism. Yet compared with the less Russian Tchaikovsky their fame has spread so slowly that even today outside Russia Moussorgsky is known for his Boris Godounov alone and that in the refined version of Rimsky-Korsakov made popular by Basso Feodor Chaliapin...
...Stokowski, the Wagner of Toscanini; and in the fervor of appreciation of individual performances they will have forgotten the millions whose musical sense has been awakened by Damrosch. They will have forgotten that it was Damrosch who first introduced to the U. S. such composers as Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Rimsky-Korsakov; such artists as Kreisler, Lilli Lehmann, Paderewski; that Damrosch, first of the important conductors, took stock of jazz and siphoned it off for the seriously musical to take or leave as they would; that Damrosch first took his orchestra on the road, to cities and towns which knew no music...
...BEST SELLING ALBUMS are Rimsky-Korsakov's SCHEHEREZADE and TSCHAIKOWSKI'S NUTCRACKER SUITE. And justly. Both by the Philadelphia orchestra...