Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Rimsky-Korsakov: Christmas Eve

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

According to the old unreformed calendar still followed in the Russian Orthodox faith, Christmas has not yet arrived. (Orthodox Christmas Day falls on January 7th.) On Sunday, December 24, 1995, I presented one of two recordings I have of Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Christmas Eve (1895), for which the composer prepared his own libretto based on a comic tale about amorous carryings-on in a village in oldtime Ukraine. (The story comes from the same collection by Gogol about peasant life that Modest Mussorgsky drew upon for his unfinished comic opera The Fair at Sorochinsk.)

Rimsky-Korsakov was known as a brilliant orchestral colorist, so the score of this peasant opera is brightly colored with references to Ukrainian folk melodies, particularly the koliadki or Slavic Christmas carols, as well as echoes of Russian Orthodox chant and even some quotations from the works of other contemporaneous Russian composers. There are elements of pagan Slavic folklore in the characters of the opera, one of whom is a witch.

Christmas Eve was recorded in Moscow in 1990 for Saison Russe, with Mikhail Yurovski conducting the "Forum" Theater Orchestra and Yurlov Academic Choir. The French Harmonia Mundi record label picked it up for distribution in the West. HM France issued it on two CD's in its "Le Chant du Monde" series in 1991. I also have an earlier mono recording of this opera from 1948 which has been digitally upgraded for CD release through the Italian Arlecchino label. Nicolai Golovanov directed the Moscow Radio Choir and Orchestra in what must have been the aircheck of a broadcast performance. That historic recording, in a remarkably good sonic transfer, went over the air on Sunday, January 3, 1999.