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Arensky's ballet "Egyptian nights"
Posted by Rob Maynard on November 25, 2021, 4:01 pm
I concur entirely with my MusicWeb colleague William Kreindler in finding Arensky's score an enjoyable one - though, at an awkward 50 minutes in length, it's easy to appreciate why the ballet hasn't been staged more frequently.
Interestingly enough, whenever "Egyptian nights" (St Petersburg, 1908) has been staged, it has tended to be in its slightly revised incarnation "Cléopâtre" (Paris, 1909). The latter adds snatches of music by Rimsky-Korsakov, Glinka, Mussorgsky and Glazunov.
From a dramatic point of view, "Cléopâtre" is the more effective piece as it jettisons the happy - but rather trite - ending of "Egyptian nights" and substitutes a tragic one in which Amoûn dies from the effects of Cleopatra's poison. That ending fits the mood of the music at that point rather more effectively, I think.
An old Soviet-era feature film, starring the wonderful dancer Farukh Ruzimatov, used to be posted on YouTube but was indexed in Cyrillic script so I cannot currently locate it. Although the English-language credits called it "Egyptian nights", it utilised the "sad" ending and so was presumably "Cléopâtre". YouTube currently offers two more modern productions of "Cléopâtre" - one from Italy (
