(Section 'E)
Led by Laurance Turner
Conducted by Aylmer Buesst
As one would expect of a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, the orchestration of Arensky's Symphony No. I, in B minor, is very brilliant, and the influence of Borodin's symphony in the same key, completed only five or six years earlier, is obvious-particularly in the racy finale. In the first movement Tchaikovsky seems to be shaking hands with Rimsky-Korsakov, but the pastoral slow movement is thoroughly characteristic, of Arensky's own elegiac vein and the scherzo shows him already experimenting with 5/4 time. The last movement is based on two folk songs taken from Balakirev's collection. The first is the tune of a spring dancing game. The second, more sustained, is a barge-haulers' song, ' My little plot of earth ', also from the Don country-a pleasant reminder that Russia possesses other singing boatmen than those of the Volga.