ExclusiveRimsky-Korsakow: Christmas Eve: Act 3: Polonaise
【Classical music and nature 古典音樂小站】Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakow: Christmas Eve: Act 3: Polonaise. This beautiful piece was played by US Air Force Band. It has Creative Commons license (Public Domain Mark 1.0 Universal) and is provided through www.musopen.org.
"Christmas Eve" is an opera in four acts with music and libretto by Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov and composed between 1894 and 1895. In the 3rd act of the opera, a chorus sings the "Tsaritsa's praises" in a magnificent polonaise. This "Polonaise" became popular in an orchestral version as well and is now transcribed for Symphonic Band by American arranger Douglas McLain.
The story of the opera is as follows:
"It’s Christmas in the Ukrainian village of Dikanka and the blacksmith Wakula is unhappily in love with Oksana, daughter of a landowner. She only wants to marry him on the condition that he gets her the Tsarina's golden shoes. In desperation, Wakula turns to the devil to fly him to the capital and help him procure the shoes. Will this be enough to win the hand of Oksana?
Rimsky-Korsakov’s Christmas Eve is a satirical-realistic depiction of Ukrainian village life combined with fantastic and mythological elements. It is a feast of villagers' Christmas songs, lyrical arias, buffo scenes and dance numbers set to orchestral interludes. The relationship between man and nature, between the individual and the cosmos is at the centre of the opera. Rimsky-Korsakov himself wrote the libretto based on Gogol's story of the same name. As an avowed pantheist, the composer saw nature as an image of the divine - and thus as something absolutely worth preserving. He added mythological elements of pagan folk belief; he has stars dancing in the sky and the apparition of human-looking sun gods." Source: operavision.eu
The rainbow was shot by Simone Schlegel in Switzerland in the afternoon and edited by Wenjing Ma.
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