October 20, 2009: Russians for the October Russian Music Festival

It is always interesting to see what sorts of arrangements Alexander Vereshagin prepares for his Russian Chamber Orchestra when they perform in the Noontime Concerts™ series at Old St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco.  This time he took the same approach that Clarice Assad had applied in her arrangement of Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition for the New Century Chamber Orchestra strings supplemented with parts for piano and percussion.  Vereshagin applied this strategy to five scenes from Sergei Prokofiev's score for the ballet Romeo and Juliet and the Largo movement from Sergei Rachmaninoff's fourth piano concerto.  His approach to the Romeo and Juliet scenes was particularly skillful, since it is hard to imagine "orchestral" Prokofiev without an abundant offering of brass and winds;  but, as Assad had done, he compensated for their absence by drawing upon particularly colorful sonorities from the piano.  On the other hand Rachmaninoff's use of orchestral color is not as striking, particularly in the movement that Vereshagin arranged;  and what mattered most was that the spirit of the concerto itself was maintained.

Vereshagin also has a habit of concluding with an interesting encore, choosing composers who are either unexpected (as in Leroy Anderson) or unfamiliar, as was the case today.  The composer in question was Georgy Sviridov, and the composition was a waltz.  This was presumably from the suite described as follows in his Wikipedia entry:

Among Sviridov's most popular orchestral pieces are the Romance and the Waltz from his The Blizzard, musical illustrations after Pushkin (1975), that were originally written for the eponymous 1964 film based on the short story from Pushkin's The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin.

My ears detected a family resemblance between this waltz and the one composed by Aram Khachaturian as incidental music for Mikhail Lermontov's play Masquerade.  However, since the Wikipedia sources indicate no such connection, my guess is that this was just a matter of familiar rhetorical idioms that these two composers shared.