Baba Yaga: Songs & Dances of Death

22 October 2025, 8:00pm - 9:15pm

Baba Yaga: Songs & Dances of Death is a thrilling new production, created in partnership with Beethovenfest Bonn, and given its full premiere tonight. It combines music, dance, spoken word and a specially commissioned song cycle by Elena Langer, to explore Baba Yaga, the mysterious figure from Slavic folklore, and her related female archetype, the Death-Skeleton Woman in Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death. Devised by mezzo-soprano Rowan Hellier, who is sought after both as a singer and an innovative curator, the programme includes music ranging from Dvořák to Tori Amos.

Rowan is joined by dancers Ana Dordevic and Carola Schwab and pianist Sholto Kynoch. The choreography is by Andreas Heise, who has directed work for Garsington Opera, the Salzburg Festival and Norwegian National Opera, amongst many others. His version of Winterreise with Juliane Banse was an unforgettable highlight of the 2023 Festival.

This production is co-directed by Rowan Hellier and Andreas Heise. Costumes and lighting are designed by Sascha Thomsen.

Programme

Modest Mussorgsky (1839 - 1881)
Trepak (1875) from Songs and Dances of Death ('Pesni i pljaski smerti')

Leoš Janáček (1854 - 1928)
Kvítí milodìjné 'Love Herbs' from Moravian Folk Poetry in Song

Antonín Dvořák (1841 - 1904)
Když mne stará matka (Songs my mother taught me) (1880) Op. 55 from Cigánské Melodie (Gypsy Songs)
Dejte klec jestřábu (Give a hawk a cage) (1880) Op. 55 from Cigánské Melodie (Gypsy Songs)

Leoš Janáček (1854 - 1928)
The barn owl has not flown away from On an Overgrown Path

Modest Mussorgsky (1839 - 1881)
Serenade (1875) from Songs and Dances of Death ('Pesni i pljaski smerti')

*****

Trad. Scottish
The Witches' Reel

Handel (1685 - 1759)
Il suol che preme

*****

Elena Langer (1974)
Baba Yaga

*****

Trad. Lithuanian
A-a-a You Little Son (Lullaby)

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840 - 1893)
Baba Yaga

*****

Modest Mussorgsky (1839 - 1881)
Polkovodec ('Field marshal') (1877) from Songs and Dances of Death ('Pesni i pljaski smerti')

Frédéric Chopin (1810 - 1849)
Prelude in C minor Op. 28 No. 20

Leoš Janáček (1854 - 1928)
Povez mi, synecku 'Calumny' from Moravian Folk Poetry in Song

Modest Mussorgsky (1839 - 1881)
Baba Yaga from Pictures at an Exhibition

Benjamin Britten (1913 - 1976)
A Charm (1947) from A Charm of Lullabies

Jake Heggie (1961)
Snake from Eve-Song

Notes on the Programme

Nice Weather for Witches:

I wrote this song-cycle for Rowan Hellier and Sholto Kynoch to perform, with choreography by Andreas Heise, as part of their recital 'Baba Yaga: Songs and Dances of Death'.

I chose a few 20th-century Russian poems by Boris Pasternak, Sergei Yesenin, Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetayeva, plus an old folk text, to make a kind of potpourri libretto. The connecting thread in all the poems is that the main character is female. She appears in various guises: a witch, a temptress, a flirtatious, naive girl, and the lover of a prisoner. Another connecting link is a repeated musical refrain, a song called ‘Snow’ – I cut Pasternak’s poem into several segments, and slotted it in between the other songs. Pasternak’s falling snow is a metaphor for the passing of time and life, and in my cycle it is the backdrop to the various funny and tragic episodes.

For a change of weather, in the last song there is lightning and rain, then the rain stops and the sun shines brightly. The finale is positive: the piano textures are sparkling and gleaming and bell-like, and the voice sings long diatonic lyrical lines. Apparently even witches can enjoy a spot of nice weather.

The songs have dance rhythms, since they are also designed to be danced. I included a few hand-held percussion instruments, tambourine, claves and rain-stick, for the dancers to hit and shake and move and play with.