Glinka tribute

‘His music is minor, of course; but he is not’— thus Stravinsky characterised his compatriot and artistic ancestor Mikhail Glinka, whose bicentenary this year has passed virtually unnoticed: no Life for the Czar at Covent Garden (well suited to such a prevailingly Italianate work); no Russlan and Ludmilla at the Coliseum (well suited because of its fairytale, legendary quality). One delectable Saturday first-half at the Proms could have given Soirées de Madrid and Kamarinskaya, as well as the Valse-fantaisie and the Russlan dances demoted elsewhere to mere fillers, making a more than token tribute to a composer without whom the subsequent growth of Russian music, thence the main trajectory of all music, would have been different.

Kamarinskaya is the one that matters. This modest little piece for orchestra, alternating two folk wedding songs, written in 1848, is simplicity itself — a brief introduction to a slow melody in unison, followed by three varied harmonisations, then another bit of preluding; then a snatch of fast dance tune, four bars long (really only two, since each half comes twice), much repeated with varying harmony and instrumentation, gradually modifying rather than transforming; then, with a key switch, the slow song returns three times; then a return of the fast dance, extended to allow further variants — melodic, harmonic, instrumental — but still basically repetition, soon returning to the opening key, and working up to a loud whirling climax, after which it fragments and stops.

Whether or not he knew it, Glinka’s unpretentious little piece (six minutes short) amounts to a total subversion of every hallowed mid-European tradition. No development, no form except naive alternation, only one modulation, then back, and a texture consisting of nothing save slightly varied repetition.