Storytelling In Music

As I intimated, another BBC Music mag cover disk with some duplicate repertoire that I won't post much about now. In this case it is Rimsky-Korsakov's Sheherazade, which only fairly recently came off the shelf in my Beecham recording. No hardship to hear the piece again, however, in this performance by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Alexander Titov with leader Elizabeth Layton taking the solo violin part of Sheherazade. There are some makeweights on the disk too, this time with Titov conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra in short works by Lyadov. The notoriously lazy Lyadov ( who couldn't be bothered to finish a comission for The Firebird and so gave Stravinsky a big break ) specialised in short works of course. The pieces here are Baba-Yaga, The Enchanted Lake and Kikimora. They are in fact all wonderfully well orchestrated in the style of his teacher Rimsky, all tone poems based on folk / fairy tales and utilising the feel of folk melodies. A good addition to the disk.