The Red Poppy, Op. 70

The Red Poppy is a full-length ballet score, but almost all modern hearings come from a short suite or, most often, a single extracted number: the "Russian Sailors' Dance" (also known as the "Dance of the Soviet Sailors"). The dance opens with a stamping, march-like tune in the low strings and brass, built on a real Russian sailors' folk dance rhythm, the kind of tune designed to be clapped out on a ship's deck. Glière repeats and thickens this tune with each pass, adding brass fanfares and rising volume, so that what begins as a solo-sounding dance grows into a full-orchestra stomp. Listen for the way the melody never really changes, instead the orchestration around it gets busier and louder, verse by verse, until the final bars pile every section on top of one another for a big, percussive close. If a fuller suite is played, expect surrounding numbers in a similarly bright, tuneful, dance-driven style, colored with the kind of "exotic" harmonies and instrumentation Glière used elsewhere to evoke the ballet's Chinese port setting, before the sailors' dance returns as the high point.

Glière composed The Red Poppy in the late 1920s as a full-length ballet for the Bolshoi Theatre, one of the first Soviet ballets to take a contemporary political subject, the friendship between Chinese dockworkers and visiting Soviet sailors, rather than a fairy tale. It was premiered in Moscow in 1927 and became enormously popular in the Soviet Union, though its title was later softened to The Red Flower in some stagings because "poppy" carried unwanted opium associations. Outside Russia the complete ballet is rarely staged today. What has survived in the wider concert repertory is the "Russian Sailors' Dance," a vigorous set-piece extracted from the score, which became one of the most frequently encored orchestral showpieces of the mid-20th century and remains a popular pops-concert and encore item for American orchestras.