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Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Rimsky-Korsakov: The Tsar's Bride
Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:
The fifteen operas of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov display a wealth of Russian folklore upon the lyric stage. These fantastic tales are framed in brilliantly orchestrated scoring with melodies inspired by Russian folk song and dance. Rimsky-Korsakov also touched upon Russian history in the quasi-legendary period of the first Tsar, Ivan the Terrible.
The Tsar's Bride (1899), his ninth opera, sets forth a story of young love, political intrigue at the highest levels of Ivan's regime, xenophobia, and peasant superstition. A poisonous love potion figures tragically in the plot. This will be the fourth time over four decades of lyric theater broadcasting that I have presented The Tsar's Bride. The first time was long ago on Sunday, January 15, 1989, when I aired the old Bolshoi Theatre recording dating from the 1970s on Angel/Melodiya LPs. Then on Sunday, September 29, 2002 came a more recent recording from Moscow's famed Bolshoi, made in 1992. It was issued here in the West on compact disc by Harmonia Mundi of France in its Le Chant du Monde series. Andre Chistiakov directs the house orchestra, chorus, and an all native-Russian speaking cast of vocal soloists. This is the same CD recording I featured again on Sunday, April 20, 2008. Listen to it yet again this afternoon.