Masquerade, Suite

In 1941, Khachaturian was asked to write incidental music for a production in Moscow of Masquerade, a play by the 19th-century writer Mikhail Lermontov. The production’s run was short-lived, but three years later Khachaturian assembled an orchestral suite of five numbers from the score, lasting around 16 minutes in all. The Suite opens with the “Waltz”, one of Khachaturian’s best known pieces. Although ostensibly reflecting the glamorous social milieu of 1830s St Petersburg, the music’s minor-key harmonies and rumbling percussion hint at the deeper undertow of Lermontov’s play, and its dark tale of jealousy and murder. The “Nocturne”, with its sinuous violin solo, is also tinged with unease, though in the swaggering “Mazurka” this is forcefully swept to the background. An impassioned “Romance”, yearning yet palpably unsettled, precedes the concluding “Galop”, where amid the manic exhilaration a dangerous element of uncontrolled abandon is suggested.