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Jonathan James takes us inside the music as part of our classical music series.

Discover about Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade and how the composer paints pictures through music to bring to life the tales of Arabian Nights.

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Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade is a magical musical fairy tale. We start off with a sultan, who’s clearly a baddie. [Jonathan plays evil tune]

In fact you can tell right from the music that he’s… evil. [plays downward scale]

The Russian often used this scale - [plays downward scale again] a whole tone scale - to denote someone who’s either evil or magical. It doesn’t sound evil if I do this. [plays descending major scale]

It sounds quite happy doesn’t it? So that’s the sultan and then of course we have Sheherazade, represented normally as a solo violin. [plays beautiful delicate tune]

Very, very beautiful and princess-like. And what follows are four tales where she keeps the sultan so enthralled that he won’t follow through on his edict to kill her as his wife.

So she’s there with all these cliff-hangers and passionate stories. And the first – well the first one is set here. [plays rolling arpeggios]

Where do you think? I’m hoping you’re thinking the sea. Because this is about Sinbad the Sailor. And what you’ll hear in this story and all the others, is the sultan theme and Sheherazade theme come back again and again, but just in different costumes. It’s almost as if they are playing the different characters, in the stories, putting on different accents and voices.

In the second tale a prince, a Russian prince, singing a Russian folk song. It’s played by the bassoon. [plays Russian folk tune]

And halfway through this particular story comes one of my favourite effects. It really is, ah, a dramatic moment. It’s the equivalent of a story teller sort of pulling out a puppet or a prop.

And what happens is that Rimsky-Korsakov asks all the strings just to pluck away randomly. [plays shimmering music]

Can you imagine a string orchestra plucking? And over the top of it this wonderful, smooth clarinet. [plays shimmering music with tune]
You have to hear it live to really get the most of it.

After that we have a romantic interlude and a really rousing, thrilling finale. The Russians are great at writing thrilling dances, and you’d expect this dance to end with a bang. Well, it doesn’t. And I’m not going to tell you how it does end, because, in the spirit of Sheherazade, let’s just leave that as a cliffhanger.

What makes this musical fairytale so full of magic for you? We’d love to know, so please do send us your comments, and feel free to like and to subscribe to these videos. Thanks for watching.