Cantus Arcticus, etc.

When I first moved to Karlskrona there were two branches of the Skivlagret record shop: the cooler one in the town centre and a blander one in an out-of-town mall in the same building as the Robin Hood supermarket. The latter location held a stock of budget Naxos classical releases, and it was thanks to these discs that I first got into the music of Shostakovich, and also, into the work of Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara.

There are three pieces on the CD, all featuring the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, conducted by Hannu Lintu: 'Cantus Arcticus', a so-called 'concerto for birds and orchestra', with the former represented by tape-recordings of birdsong made in northern Finland. This is an immediately-accessible and beautiful composition, somewhat reminiscent of Sibelius. Next is the striking 'Piano Concerto No. 1', with Laura Mikkola the soloist, which is predominantly melodic, but with piquant 'cluster' chords on the piano made by applying a whole fist or forearm to the keyboard.

Lastly there is what is to me a less appealing work in the shape of Rautavaara's 'Symphony No. 3' - a piece which combines modernist serialism and 19th-century Germanic symphonic flavours. The first two works sufficed to get me interested in this composer and, while, I bought a good many more CDs of his work thereafter, and although there are probably better performances of these works elsewhere, I retain great affection for this album.

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Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4. An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...

Ein Schattenspiel, etc.

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Influencías

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This is a Recording

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