Caryl Emerson and Robert Oldani take a comprehensive look at the most famous Russian opera, Modest Musorgsky's Boris Godunov.

Caryl Emerson and Robert Oldani take a comprehensive look at the most famous Russian opera, Modest Musorgsky's Boris Godunov.

When the inspiration was upon him, he could apply himself with superhuman intensity, as he did when composing the initial version of Boris Godunov. Sadly, Musorgsky deteriorated in his final years, suffering periods of inner turmoil, when his alcoholism would be out of control. Finally, unemployed and all but destitute, he died at age forty-two. His failure to complete his two remaining operas, Khovanshchina and Sorochintsy Fair, Brown concludes, is one of music's greatest tragedies."--BOOK JACKET.

Within a Bakhtinian framework, Caryl Emerson explores these three versions of the Boris Tale, the context of their genesis, and their complex interrelationships.

The Reader's Guide to Music is designed to provide a useful single-volume guide to the ever-increasing number of English language book-length studies in music. Each entry consists of a bibliography of some 3-20 titles and an essay in which these titles are evaluated, by an expert in the field, in light of the history of writing and scholarship on the given topic. The more than 500 entries include not just writings on major composers in music history but also the genres in which they worked (from early chant to rock and roll) and topics important to the various disciplines of music scholarship (from aesthetics to gay/lesbian musicology).

One of the first Russian tone poems, Night on Bald Mountain had its genesis in the late 1850s when Mussorgsky started sketches for a projected opera: St. John's Eve (1858), later changed to The Witch (1860) - based upon a scenario about a witches' sabbath on St. John's Eve. These were abandonded by the early 1860s but Mussorgsky contemplated a tone poem using the material featuring piano and orchestra along the lines of Liszt's Totentanz. The work was finally completed on St. John's Eve (June 23) of 1867 as an orchestral tone poem entited St. John's Eve on the Bare Mountain. The symphonic poem was never performed in the composer's lifetime. After rejection for performance, Mussorgsky reworked the material two more times for operatic projects that never materialized. After the composer's death his friend Rimsky-Korsakov prepared a new arrangement based on the last version composed for the opera Sorochintsy Fair which was published in 1886. Rimsky's arrangement became very popular, especially after its use in the 1939 Walt Disney film Fantasia in a very bowldwerized orchestration made by Leopold Stowkowski. Rimsky's setting is the work offered here - in a newly engraved edition by Richard W. Sargeant, Jr. It is now often regarded as more of a fantasy on themes by Mussorgsky composed by Rimsky-Korsakov. IMSLP page Wikipedia article

inch....this work is likely to become a standart work very quickly and is to be recommended to all schools where recorder studies are undertaken inch. (Oliver James,Contact Magazine) A novel and comprehensive approach to transferring from the C to F instrument. 430 music examples include folk and national songs (some in two parts), country dance tunes and excerpts from the standard treble repertoire ofBach, Barsanti, Corelli, Handel, Telemann, etc. An outstanding feature of the book has proved to be Brian Bonsor's brilliantly simple but highly effective practice circles and recognition squares designed to give, in only a few minutes, concentrated practice on the more usual leaps to and from each new note and instant recognition of random notes. Quickly emulating the outstanding success of the descant tutors, these books are very popular even with those who normally use tutors other than the Enjoy the Recorder series.