Christmas Eve

The Polonaise opens with a proud, strutting rhythm in triple meter, the kind of stately dance Polish nobility once used to make an entrance. Listen for the brass and strings trading the main tune back and forth, each time dressed in brighter orchestral colors. Rimsky-Korsakov, famous for his skill at orchestration, gives the woodwinds sparkling little runs that flicker above the melody like frost on a window. Partway through, the music softens into a more lyrical middle section, the dance relaxing into something warmer and more songful before the opening strut returns. The piece builds to a confident, full-orchestra close, the kind of bright curtain-raiser that works equally well opening a concert or capping one. Because this excerpt began life inside a much longer opera about a village blacksmith, a mischievous devil, and a journey to the Tsarina's court, the concert version compresses all of that folk-tale energy into a few minutes of pure orchestral sparkle, without needing any of the plot to make its effect.

Rimsky-Korsakov composed his opera Christmas Eve in the 1890s, drawing on Nikolai Gogol's story of the same name, a tale mixing village life, folklore, and a devil who steals the moon. The opera had already been set by Tchaikovsky under a different title, and Rimsky-Korsakov took care to shape his own version around Ukrainian folk customs and Orthodox Christmas Eve traditions. The Polonaise appears during the opera's court scene, where the blacksmith Vakula arrives before the Tsarina. Like several of the composer's other operatic dances, it soon detached itself from the stage and found a lasting home on orchestral programs, valued for its brightness and its concise, self-contained shape. It remains one of the more frequently excerpted numbers from an opera that is otherwise rarely staged outside Russia.