Uploaded October 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Bolshoi Soloists Ensemble conducted by Alexander Lazarev.
I - Introduction. Lento (0:00) - Moderato - Scene I. Tempo rubato (5:18) - Moderato - Scene II. Agitato (9:56) - Andante molto espressivo - Senza metrus - Andante - Moderato - Scene III (17:23) - Scene IV. Lento molto (20:02) - Lento - Allegretto - Lento - Allegretto - Lento - Allegretto - Lento - Allegretto - Vivo - Scene V (21:33) - Scene VI. Maestoso (29:49)
Schnittke's "The Yellow Sound" (Der gelbe Klang) was composed between 1973-4, based on the 1909 libretto by Russian-French painter Wassily Kandinsky. The music was first performed on 1975 at the Festival in Sainte Baume, France. The first staged performance took place in Moscow on January 6 of 1984, performed by the Bolshoi Soloists' Ensemble together with the Moscow Ensemble of Plastic Drama. That is the performance, recorded in the presence of the composer, presented in this video.
The interrelationships between sound, colour, shape and movement interested Wassily Kandinsky throughout his life: in his youth he had dreamt of becoming a musician and later took a lively interest in the experiments of Scriabin with colour and music, also becoming friends with Schoenberg. In 1928 Kandinsky created a synthesis of Mussorgsky’s "Pictures at an Exhibition" with his own stage design. But his very first abstract compositions, which appeared in 1910, already testified to the astonishing musicality of his concepts as an artist. In 1912 he published "Der gelbe Klang" (The Yellow Sound) in the Munich-based expressionist almanac "Der blaue Reiter" (The Blue Horseman).
In contrast to the colour-music ideas of Scriabin and the early eurhythmic experiments of that era, Kandinsky sought to achieve a contrapuntal relationship between the language of various arts, thus anticipating by almost a century the multimedia artistic experiments of the past decade. The music was written by Kandinsky’s colleague, Thomas de Hartman, but the premiere of this version did not take place until 1982, in New York, under the leadership of composer-conductor Gunther Schuller. "The Yellow Sound" was the earliest and most influential of four "colour-tone dramas" that Kandinsky conceived for the theatre between 1909-14; the others were titled "The Green Sound", "Black and White", and "Violet".
The libretto is not a scenario in the usual sense of the word, but rather a "canvas" of relationships between movement, sound and light, all interwoven into a unified whole. It is true that there are "characters", although they are rather abstract: five yellow giants, "indistinct beings", a child, "people in loose clothing", "people in tights", and so on. The concept of the entire synthesis is defined by the theory of light developed by Kandinksy in his treatise "On the Spiritual in Art" (1911), which encompassed a broad range of aesthetic and philosophical issues.
Each colour, according to Kandinsky, is a certain spiritual substance, corresponding to a particular external sphere of being. The colour white is birth; black is death, the other colours represent pairs of life-contrasts between these poles, the most important contrast being that between yellow (earth) and blue (heaven). Each colour has its own inherent warmth, mobility and potential for development. Yellow has the most potential, directed "outwards" — the energy of a superabundance of vital and corporeal powers.
In his stage composition Yellow Sound (1974), which consists of six scenes with an introduction, Schnittke follows Kandinsky’s libretto fairly closely: the appearance of the colour yellow corresponds to the notes A and B agonisingly repeated by various instruments (violin, clarinet, piccolo, trumpet), and the general character of the drama,
where "yellow" is sharply separated from everything else. The composer had a double aim in mind — so that it could be produced on a theatre stage and so that it could be performed on a concert stage with a video presentation of reproductions of paintings by the selfsame Kandinsky.
Picture: "Yellow Accompaniment" (1924) by the Russian-French painter Wassily Kandinsky.
Sources: tinyurl.com/2csp4alj and tinyurl.com/26zcy4lp
To check the score: tinyurl.com/2axs86u5
Bolshoi Soloists Ensemble conducted by Alexander Lazarev.
I - Introduction. Lento (0:00) - Moderato - Scene I. Tempo rubato (5:18) - Moderato - Scene II. Agitato (9:56) - Andante molto espressivo - Senza metrus - Andante - Moderato - Scene III (17:23) - Scene IV. Lento molto (20:02) - Lento - Allegretto - Lento - Allegretto - Lento - Allegretto - Lento - Allegretto - Vivo - Scene V (21:33) - Scene VI. Maestoso (29:49)
Schnittke's "The Yellow Sound" (Der gelbe Klang) was composed between 1973-4, based on the 1909 libretto by Russian-French painter Wassily Kandinsky. The music was first performed on 1975 at the Festival in Sainte Baume, France. The first staged performance took place in Moscow on January 6 of 1984, performed by the Bolshoi Soloists' Ensemble together with the Moscow Ensemble of Plastic Drama. That is the performance, recorded in the presence of the composer, presented in this video.
The interrelationships between sound, colour, shape and movement interested Wassily Kandinsky throughout his life: in his youth he had dreamt of becoming a musician and later took a lively interest in the experiments of Scriabin with colour and music, also becoming friends with Schoenberg. In 1928 Kandinsky created a synthesis of Mussorgsky’s "Pictures at an Exhibition" with his own stage design. But his very first abstract compositions, which appeared in 1910, already testified to the astonishing musicality of his concepts as an artist. In 1912 he published "Der gelbe Klang" (The Yellow Sound) in the Munich-based expressionist almanac "Der blaue Reiter" (The Blue Horseman).
In contrast to the colour-music ideas of Scriabin and the early eurhythmic experiments of that era, Kandinsky sought to achieve a contrapuntal relationship between the language of various arts, thus anticipating by almost a century the multimedia artistic experiments of the past decade. The music was written by Kandinsky’s colleague, Thomas de Hartman, but the premiere of this version did not take place until 1982, in New York, under the leadership of composer-conductor Gunther Schuller. "The Yellow Sound" was the earliest and most influential of four "colour-tone dramas" that Kandinsky conceived for the theatre between 1909-14; the others were titled "The Green Sound", "Black and White", and "Violet".
The libretto is not a scenario in the usual sense of the word, but rather a "canvas" of relationships between movement, sound and light, all interwoven into a unified whole. It is true that there are "characters", although they are rather abstract: five yellow giants, "indistinct beings", a child, "people in loose clothing", "people in tights", and so on. The concept of the entire synthesis is defined by the theory of light developed by Kandinksy in his treatise "On the Spiritual in Art" (1911), which encompassed a broad range of aesthetic and philosophical issues.
Each colour, according to Kandinsky, is a certain spiritual substance, corresponding to a particular external sphere of being. The colour white is birth; black is death, the other colours represent pairs of life-contrasts between these poles, the most important contrast being that between yellow (earth) and blue (heaven). Each colour has its own inherent warmth, mobility and potential for development. Yellow has the most potential, directed "outwards" — the energy of a superabundance of vital and corporeal powers.
In his stage composition Yellow Sound (1974), which consists of six scenes with an introduction, Schnittke follows Kandinsky’s libretto fairly closely: the appearance of the colour yellow corresponds to the notes A and B agonisingly repeated by various instruments (violin, clarinet, piccolo, trumpet), and the general character of the drama,
where "yellow" is sharply separated from everything else. The composer had a double aim in mind — so that it could be produced on a theatre stage and so that it could be performed on a concert stage with a video presentation of reproductions of paintings by the selfsame Kandinsky.
Picture: "Yellow Accompaniment" (1924) by the Russian-French painter Wassily Kandinsky.
Sources: tinyurl.com/2csp4alj and tinyurl.com/26zcy4lp
To check the score: tinyurl.com/2axs86u5
