Oriental March (The Chalk Circle)

Vladigerov spent the 1920s in Berlin as composer and conductor at Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater, where a large part of his work was incidental music for productions of the house. Among those scores is the music for Klabund's Der Kreidekreis, a play adapted from a Chinese source in which a disputed child is placed inside a chalk circle and each claimant told to pull. The Oriental March comes from it. Vladigerov's answer to the Chinese setting is frankly theatrical rather than ethnographic — pentatonic outlines, percussion colour, a steady processional tread built to carry across a large stage.