The folk tale of the Snow Maiden, Snegurochka – the girl of the forest, daughter of Grandfather Frost and the Spring Fairy, who cannot love because her heart is made of ice – became the source for one of the greatest of 19th-century Russian operas, by Rimsky-Korsakov, first performed in St Petersburg in 1882. Rimsky adapted his libretto from a play based on the tale by Alexander Ostrovsky, that had its first performance nine years earlier, in a production with incidental music by Tchaikovsky. Playwright and composer had collaborated closely; the result, written between the Second and Third Symphonies and three years before the ballet Swan Lake, is a major achievement, and one of Tchaikovsky’s most neglected large-scale works.
The score for Snegurochka consists of 19 numbers that last almost 75 minutes in this recording. There’s no proper overture – after a short orchestral introduction, the prologue contains two choruses and a dance – but there are orchestral interludes, dances and a couple of melodramas (played here without the spoken text), as well as solo songs for mezzo and tenor and set-piece choruses. All the music carries echoes of Russian folk music, both in the shapes of many of the melodies and in the strophic structure of the songs. There’s both grandeur and melancholy in the score, and a quiet wistfulness that is typical Tchaikovsky, and though it’s far more substantial than suites of incidental music usually are, it falls somewhere between cantata and opera, with elements of both, and a hint of the ballets that were to come as well.
Recorded at concerts in the Leipzig Gewandhaus in 2014, the recording is the first in a Tchaikovsky series from Kristjan Järvi and the MDR Leipzig Radio Orchestra that will concentrate on the composer’s theatre music. It’s certainly a promising start; even if Järvi occasionally pushes too hard, and his two soloists, mezzo Annely Peebo and tenor Vsevolod Grivnov, are an acquired taste, both the orchestral playing and especially the singing of the MDR Radio Choir are very fine. The next three releases in the series will be devoted to the ballets; all of those, though, are much better-known than this score, and top-quality Tchaikovsky that most people will not have heard ever before is bound to be a wonderful treat.
