A new concert season was inaugurated with a performance from the Berlin Philharmonic that, in customary fashion, attracted an audience of the powerful, the famous and the generally well-dressed. This year’s programme offered a selection of Russian music from the first half of the twentieth century: Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances – the composer’s final completed work – was paired with The Firebird, one of the first major works by the yet-unestablished Stravinsky, and the result was an evening that rarely wanted for dazzling artifice and orchestral splendour. Although both pieces were written outside of the composers’ shared homeland – Stravinsky was working in Paris, while Rachmaninoff divided his time between Switzerland and the United States – they both present a self-consciously exaggerated ‘Russian’ exoticism. Yet Rachmaninoff’s…
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