Cui: A Feast in Time of Plague
Soloists
Russian State Symphony Orchestra
Valeri Polyansky
Cui is the least well known of ‘the five’. He is remembered, if at all as a miniaturist and as a rather fearsome critic, I sampled a suite of his last year https://andrew365newpieces.blogspot.com/2025/03/cui-suite-no-3-in-modo-populari.html and I found it quite pleasant without it making much of an impression.
Cui wrote 8 or 9 operas (the no depends on how you count collaborative works). This short piece is the only one I could find a recording of. It packed quite a punch in its 35 mins involving as it does 5 soloists (plus a silent character) and a chorus. It was obviously the work of a Russian composer but was clearly also within the mainstream European tradition. I enjoyed it a lot and had more trident for the composer after I had heard it than I had before. It is a late work - a reminder that Cui was the last survivor or ‘the five, dying as late as 1918, by which time he must really have seemed a fish out of water. The piece could certainly be attractive on stage today, though it is difficult to see how what it could be coupled with. It is one of four pieces based on Puskin’s Four little tragedies’ - the others are by Dargomyzhsky (The Stone Guest), Rimsky-Korsakov (Mozart and Salieri) and Rachmaninov (The Miserly Knight). Putting all four on on the same evening would however be something of a marathon.
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