Baba Yaga, Op. 56
Anatoly Liadov (1855-1914)
According to the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, Baba Yaga is a witch who ‘…flies around on a giant mortar, kidnaps and … eats small children, and lives in a hut that stands on chicken legs.’ Yes, this is the Baba Yaga whose strange dwelling features in Modeste Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. However, she is not the same person as the witch in Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, despite their unusual yet identical dietary preferences.
Anatoly Liadov harboured a penchant for the occult, the mysterious and the downright spooky, so the character of Baba Yaga lit a spark in his somewhat dormant creative furnace. He was dismissed as indolent by commentators, but his slender output is now considered to stem from low self-confidence rather than laziness. Of the four tone poems he composed towards the end of his life, Baba Yaga is generally regarded as the most vivid, brief though it is.
Within little more than three minutes, a colourful soundscape reminds us of comparable music written before and after 1904, for example the ‘Witches’ Sabbath’ from Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, Richard Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’, ‘Katschei’s Dance’ from The Firebird by Igor Stravinsky, and Paul Dukas’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice. In common with all these composers, Liadov exploited an unusually large orchestra to create the exact sounds he needed for a truly vivid result. The piece starts urgently and ends with a whisper but we are not certain what story or event, if any, is being depicted. We do know that we are being magically transported into a scintillating fantasy world in which our imaginary ride in the sky is all too brief.
Anatoly Liadov (1855-1914)
According to the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, Baba Yaga is a witch who ‘…flies around on a giant mortar, kidnaps and … eats small children, and lives in a hut that stands on chicken legs.’ Yes, this is the Baba Yaga whose strange dwelling features in Modeste Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. However, she is not the same person as the witch in Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, despite their unusual yet identical dietary preferences.
Anatoly Liadov harboured a penchant for the occult, the mysterious and the downright spooky, so the character of Baba Yaga lit a spark in his somewhat dormant creative furnace. He was dismissed as indolent by commentators, but his slender output is now considered to stem from low self-confidence rather than laziness. Of the four tone poems he composed towards the end of his life, Baba Yaga is generally regarded as the most vivid, brief though it is.
Within little more than three minutes, a colourful soundscape reminds us of comparable music written before and after 1904, for example the ‘Witches’ Sabbath’ from Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, Richard Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’, ‘Katschei’s Dance’ from The Firebird by Igor Stravinsky, and Paul Dukas’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice. In common with all these composers, Liadov exploited an unusually large orchestra to create the exact sounds he needed for a truly vivid result. The piece starts urgently and ends with a whisper but we are not certain what story or event, if any, is being depicted. We do know that we are being magically transported into a scintillating fantasy world in which our imaginary ride in the sky is all too brief.