Aram Khachaturian, "Sabre Dance"

On the web, and in discography, it is customary to illustrate the Sabre Dance with the image of an Arab girl dancing with a sabre on her head, but, actually, there is no oriental dance in which the dancer must practice such choreography. Nonetheless, the image became popular during the 19th century in line with a fashion imposed by French orientalist painters.

La danse pyrrhique

One of these painters was Jean-Léon Gerome, but we have chosen a different painting from him, La danse pyrrhique, to illustrate in a somewhat more genuine way what really happens during the scene The Sabre Dance, from the ballet Gayane, by the Russian composer of Armenian origin Aram Khachaturian. The composer included a suite of dances from Central Asian folklore during the second act. In the middle of two dances of Kurdish origin, the sabre dance evokes a dance of Armenian dancers showing off their skill with the sabre.

A. Khachaturian (1903 - 1978)

The Soviet Homeland... and Armenia
Premiered in December 1942, in the midst of the Second World War, the ballet tells the story of a young Armenian woman whose patriotic convictions conflict with her deepest feelings when she discovers that her husband has betrayed the Soviet homeland. Notwithstanding the thematics akin to the revolutionary process, the composer later had to face the customary sequence of confession and rehabilitation, typical of the Stalinist period.

But Khachaturian came out of it unscathed.

Later he devoted himself to composing works for the theater and cinema. He also became the author of the Armenian National Anthem.

Sabre Dance

The famous dance, of great vitality, includes in its middle section a traditional Armenian theme, more lyrical. Its short duration has facilitated its adaptation for cinema, TV, video games, and advertising, through multiple and varied arrangements. The irresistible and immediate attraction that it exerts on the audiences has also transformed it into one of the most recurrent "workhorses" of the great orchestral ensembles, taking advantage of the bunch of orchestral suites that the author extracted at the time from the ballet.

The performance is by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by the English maestro Sir Simon Rattle.