Kansas City Ballet Music Director Ramona Pansegrau Shared her Frescoes Saga on Wednesday, Sept. 16

Elena Kunikova arrived yesterday to begin staging the Frescoes section of Little Humpbacked Horse for Kansas City Ballet.  For me, however, the journey began last winter when William Whitener chose the work to open our season.  It’s always exciting to see what our next season repertory will be – but I was especially intrigued to hear that we were going to reconstruct a fragment of a lost Russian ballet.  My intrigue turned to trepidation however, when I discovered that the ballet was so “lost” – that there was no musical score to be had for rehearsal or for the orchestra.  So began my search.

I began trying to find a printed set of orchestral parts.  Since the work was first written in 1850 by Cesare Pugni – I started with Pugni’s collected works.  Cesare Pugni was a court composer to the Czar at the Imperial Theater in the mid 1800’s.  He, along with other well-known ballet composers – Drigo, Minkus, Asafiev, Delibes, et al. – composed an amazing amount of material in the heyday of the Russian ballet.  Pugni alone wrote over 300 ballet scores. I finally tracked down Humpbacked Horse to three places on the planet.  There is a copy at the Kirov Ballet in St. Petersburg.  Could I look at it?  No.  There’s a copy at the National Library in Paris, France.  Mr. Whitener – could I go to France?  No.  And finally – believe it or not, there’s a copy at Harvard.  How did it get to Harvard, you ask?  The score had quite a journey.  Evidently, on the eve of the Russian revolution, 31 boxes of scores and parts were smuggled out of Russia by a man named Sergeyev.  He made use of some of these works by loaning them to the Ballet Russe in the early part of the 20th century, but for the most part, the collection was just sitting at his home.  After he died, the boxes were sold at auction – luckily, they all stayed together.  A British gentleman bought the entire set and kept them until he finally donated them to the Harvard Library  - where the complete collection is now stored.  Called the Sergeyev collection, the works have in recent years been accessed by a few companies, but Harvard guards the collection – and rightly so. 

So, back to my saga.  When I discovered the collection at Harvard, I contacted them – I contacted mutual friends who have connections at Harvard, and then I begged.  I pleaded.  I did everything I could to ask for a glimpse of it.  The idea of conducting the newly reconstructed work from the original source, not heard since 1850 made me very excited!  I told them so, I did everything but tap dance.  Nope.  No way.  Forget it.

So – now what?  I had one recourse.  The orchestra was going to be sitting in the pit.  I was not going to turn on a recording – a bad recording of a live performance by the Kirov is the only thing that exists.  Not happening.   So, I needed to write it out, part by part, by listening to that awful audio recording.  There is only one way to write out a full orchestral score – and that is to listen for each instrument separately and write what you hear.  It’s very time consuming.  The good thing is – when you finish – you really know the score.  After it was all written out, I had to make a piano reduction, a conductor’s score, and separate parts for all the instruments.  I use the music writing program, Finale, for making parts and full scores.  The parts are very readable, but every note, mark, accidental, and word is a single keystroke.  Takes days.  Very long days….

So, where are we now?  Yesterday was the first rehearsal with our Russian expert, Elena Kunikova.  Step one – our versions match.  Hallelujah. I’m so relieved.   I’ve had a few nightmares about perhaps orchestrating the wrong music.  Step two – I changed my orchestra rehearsal schedule to accommodate the new score.  Things go wrong – I have to have time to fix errors that are bound to be in the score.  So, for the first time, my first and second orchestra rehearsals with the Kansas City Symphony are a week a part.  Just in case – and I need to rewrite something, I’ll have a week to fix it.  Hopefully, that won’t happen – but I really won’t know how it sounds until I hear it the first time with the full symphony orchestra.  I can’t wait.

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