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The Gaggle Music Club: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Festival Overture

Since this is Easter Sunday, according to both the Orthodox and the Catholic calendars, the Gaggle Music Club has selected a piece of music befitting the occasion: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Festival Overture, Op. 36.

Composed in 1888 and dedicated to the memory of Modest Mussorgsky and Alexander Borodin, it is is one of Rimsky-Korsakov’s most vivid and colorful orchestral works.

The piece consists of a single-movement symphonic poem lasting about 15 minutes. The structure is loose, but essentially a free fantasia on Russian Orthodox liturgical themes drawing on actual Obikhod liturgical chants. Obikhod is the traditional book of Russian Orthodox liturgy. The composer sought to depict not the solemnity of Good Friday, but the ecstatic, raucous joy of Orthodox Easter Sunday.

One of Rimsky-Korsakov’s greatest strengths was orchestration, and this piece is a tour de force. The piece requires a huge orchestra with rich percussion to imitate church bells and the joyous pealing of Easter services. It also needs vivid brass fanfares and sweeping string melodies to capture both ritual solemnity and festive exuberance.

The first movement, Largo – Allegro (Introduction, begins in a dark, mysterious atmosphere, evoking the sombre days of Holy Week. Low strings and winds produce chant-like intonations, suggesting the slow build-up to Easter vigil.

The second movement, Main Allegro Section, breaks into a radiant and fiery celebration, symbolizing the moment of the Resurrection. It incorporates actual liturgical chants such as “Christ is Risen,” and “Let God Arise.” Vivid tone painting evokes the sound and spirit of a Russian Orthodox Easter morning.

The third movement, Coda, builds to a gloriously radiant and jubilant close. Church bells, blazing brass and wild rhythms suggest a mass of people pouring into the streets.

While the music of the overture draws from the Orthodox liturgy, it’s not a religious work in the sacred sense. Rimsky-Korsakov transforms chant into something pagan in vitality and orchestral exuberance. The music is more about the atmosphere and cultural spirit of Russian Easter — not a profession of faith. He once said of the work: “I wanted to reproduce the legendary and heathen side of the holiday, the transition from the gloomy and mysterious evening of Passion Saturday to the unbridled pagan-religious merrymaking on the morning of Easter Sunday.”

Rimsky-Korsakov was not devout. He admired the aesthetic and musical beauty of the Orthodox Church, but not its dogma. His use of sacred chant in this overture is ethnographic and artistic, not devotional. He once remarked: “I am not religious, but I feel religion as art.”

With the Russian Easter Festival Overture, Rimsky-Korsakov reached the peak of his orchestral imagination. Like Scheherazade, the work is an extraordinary example of musical storytelling without words. The music is a secular homage to a spiritual tradition, and it's rendered with lavish, brilliant orchestration.

In this recording from 2023, the Bavarian State Youth Orchestra performs under the direction of Nicolas Rauss.

00:17:17
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TG 1978: E.U.'s Plan To Override Hungary's Objections In Order To Get Ukraine In

George Szamuely discusses the latest European Union ruse to ignore its own rules, not to mention the strong objections of Hungary, in order to get Ukraine in as a member.

00:38:38
Live Chat
September 29, 2025
Monday Night At The Movies: "The Wicker Man" (1973)

Join Gagglers for "The Wicker Man"!
The screening starts at 3 p.m. ET sharp.
Share all of your thoughts, comments and criticisms on the Live Chat.

01:33:08
September 28, 2025
The Gaggle Music Club: Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements

This week's selection for The Gaggle Music Club is Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements. Completed in 1945, the symphony is one Stravinsky's most important late works. Commissioned by the New York Philharmonic Symphony Society, the symphony premiered on Jan. 24, 1946 at Carnegie Hall, conducted by Stravinsky himself.

Often called Stravinsky's “first American symphony,” the composition shows his neoclassical language at its most taut: sharp orchestration, motor-like rhythms, lean textures.

Although Stravinsky often denied overt programmatic meaning in his music, he later admitted that the Symphony in Three Movements was a “war symphony.” The first movement, for example, was inspired by newsreel footage of wartime scorched earth tactics. Its violent rhythms and jagged piano writing reflect mechanized destruction. The final movement was inspired by Allied military advances, including the crossing of the Rhine in 1945. The march rhythms and the relentless drive exude a sense of military ...

00:23:14
Monday Night At The Movies

Please choose which one of the following 8 movies you would like to have screened next Monday, Oct. 6.

The theme is "memory, time and discontinuity."

Please continue to vote after Oct. 6, so that we can determine the runner-up. The runner-up will be screened on Oct.13.

Dear George

I've seen you get quite a lot of heat in YouTube comments about your, nuanced unemotional.. political soliloquies / essays especially if you talk about Russia or Trump , I think most of these people tend to be TDS types or fanboys/NPCs / bots , , I'm open minded, and prefer value free analysis, not ra ra ..dogma .. and I'm not a big fan of trump(at all) but I'm not interested in hearing frothing at the mouth slop , or Russia is bestest ever bs , " Ukraine Collapse" (, every episode for months , I will mention no names) .. , I think you're doing a great job . Keep it up

I mean, I repeat myself, but in the grand scheme of things, Hungarian and Slovak consumption of oil is really a speck on the radar, I guess this is mostly for show (unity in the face of aggression and all that shit)

Croatia Offered Hungary and Slovakia an Alternative to Russian Oil

Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković said Zagreb is ready to supply Hungary and Slovakia with more than 12 million tons of oil annually via the Adriatic pipeline, fully covering their refinery needs.

Presenting it as a reliable alternative to Russian crude amid U.S.-linked sanctions pressure, he noted that price remains a key factor. He emphasized that using the pipeline would bolster the EU’s united stance on sanctions, with operator JANAF prepared for long-term contracts.

Built in the 1970s from Croatia’s Krk Island toward Central Europe, the route was designed for diversification and now offers a substitute to Russia’s Druzhba pipeline.

January 21, 2023
More Leftie Than Thou
"Jacobin" Magazine Celebrates A Strike Against Ol' Blue Eyes

Here at "The Gaggle" we have very little time for the "more Leftie than thou" school of thought--that's the approach to life according to which the only thing that matters is whether you take the right position on every issue under the sun from Abortion to Zelensky. No one in the world meets the exacting standards of this school of thought; any Leftie leader anywhere is always selling out to the bankers and the capitalists. The perfect exemplar of this is the unreadable Jacobin magazine. 

The other day I came across this article from 2021. It's a celebration of trade union power. And not simply trade union power, but the use of trade union power to secure political goals. Of course (and this is always the case with the "more Leftie than thou" crowd), this glorious, never-to-be-forgotten moment on the history of organized labor took place many years ago--in the summer of 1974 to be exact. Yes, almost half a century has gone by since that thrilling moment when the working-class movement of Australia mobilized and prepared to seize the means of production, distribution and exchange. 

Well, not quite. Organized labor went into action against...Ol' Blue Eyes, the Chairman of the Board, the Voice; yes, Frank Sinatra. Why? What had Sinatra done? Sinatra was certainly very rich, and he owned a variety of properties and businesses. But if the Australian trade union movement were, understandably, searching for the bright, incandescent spark that would finally awaken the working class from its slumber there were surely richer, greedier, more dishonest, more decadent, above all more Australian individuals it could have discovered. Australia was never short of them. Rupert Murdoch immediately springs to mind. Why Sinatra?

 

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