This is a Recording

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...

About twenty years ago I aquired a wonderful and educational 3-CD box set called OHM: The Early Gurus Of Electronic Music . Among its tracks was an excerpt from Karlheinz Stockhausen's piece 'Kontakte'. As with much of Stockhausen's output, it's not the most immediately-accessible music, but I did acquire a fondness for it, and became curious to hear all 35 minutes of the piece. I suspect I would have ordered my CD copy a couple of years later from a long-defunct UK on-line classical specialist called "Crotchet". It's a 1992 re-issue of a recording made in 1960, the same one from which the excerpt on the compilation had been taken. 'Kontakte' exists in two versions: the original all-electronic one; and the better-known "hybrid" version with parts for live piano and percussion backed up by electronic sounds on tape. The possibilities of modern "live electronics" would doubtless have thrilled Stockhausen, but were a lon...

This CD is part of a late-'90s series under the collective title Musica Non Grata ("Undesirable Music") featuring pieces drawn from the archives of the Russian Melodiya record label by composers who had variously been "threatened, vilified, reviled and reduced to silence or, at best, grudgingly tolerated" by the Soviet regime. It brings together two of the eight symphonies written by the Armenian composer Alfred "Avet" Terteryan (or Terterian). This wasn't an easy item to find, and I ended up paying £20 for a used copy via ebay earlier this year. Symphony No. 3 (1975) is written for a large symphony orchestra augmented by the duduk and zurna, (traditional Armenian woodwind instruments). It's cast in three movements, and peformed here by the Armenian SSR State Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Khandjan. Terteryan was evidently partial to wide dynamic contrasts, alternating & juxtaposing judderingly loud percussion, strident woodwinds an...

Why do I have a bulky 12-LP box set of "Light Classical Music" occupying some of my limited shelf-space when I have no intention of listening to the music therein? Sentimental reasons explain it. Visiting my father one day he asked what music I was listening to & I replied that about half of it was classical in some form or another. He'd never acquired any taste for it, he said, whereupon a thought occurred to him and he retrieved this box from another room and handed it to me: it had been his mother's. I didn't imagine I'd end up with a keepsake of my paternal grandmother. It was surprising that anything of hers had survived some rather chaotic episodes in her house in the years following her death. Having said that, it had suffered considerable wear and tear: the box itself was broken, some of the inner sleeves were torn & stained, and one of the discs (no. 4) was in patently unplayable condition. Knowing it had been kept near a coal fire, and not fa...

Georgy Vasilyevich Sviridov was a Soviet-era Russian composer, probably best-known internationally for his choral and other vocal works: cantatas, oratorios, hymns. etc.. Russians of a certain age will remember him for his piece Time, Forward! part of which was used as the theme for the TV evening news broadcast «Время» . As well as a substantial corpus of choruses, film scores & the like, he also produced some chamber music, which is the focus of the present CD. Sviridov had studied with Shostakovich, nine years his senior, with the older man's influence strongly evident on the pieces included here. Sviridov's 'Piano Trio', written in 1945 and revised ten years later, is, at times, very reminiscent of Shostakovich's 2nd Trio written the year before: such in the piano chords in the agitated Scherzo second movement. Elsewhere (so Iossif Rajskin's booklet notes inform me), Sviridov was more broadly inspired by the Russian tradition of elegaic music for piano ...

The ten movements of Olivier Messiaen's epic 'Turangalîla Symphony' run to around 80 minutes' duration in all, so it's never going to fit on to a single LP. Here it occupies three sides of vinyl, with a fourth devoted to 'November Steps', a piece by Tōru Takemitsu, apparently given its debut recording on this 1968 RCA release. The Toronto Symphony Orchestra were joined on the former piece by the composer's wife Yvonne Loriod at the piano with her sister Jeanne playing the ondes Martenots. On the latter, Kinshi Tsuruta played the biwa and Katsuya Yokoyama the shakuhachi. Seiji Ozawa conducted. Extensive sleeve-notes written by Messiaen himself (translated by Louis Biancolli) explain the work's origins in an obsession with the story of Tristan and Isolde; its varied symbolism; its title (derived from two Sanskrit words); its overarching theme as being a "song of love, a hymn to joy" (of the mystical & transcendent sorts); its complex rhyt...

This 2006 box set's full title is simply a list of the six pieces contained within: Asrael | A Summer's Tale | The Ripening | Epilogue | Fairy Tale | Praga - these being the major orchestral works of the Czech violinist and composer Josef Suk (1874-1935). The performances collected here date from between 1985-89, and feature the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, with Václav Neumann conducting 'Asrael', 'The Ripening' and 'Epilogue', and Libor Pešek at the podium for the other three works. On 'Epilogue', the Prague Philharmonic Choir and three solo singers can also be heard. I'd first heard Suk's music on a Naxos CD I bought ca. 2001 on which 'A Summer's Tale' was the stand-out. I especially loved its second and third movements. Seeking to explore further, I acquired an album including both 'Asrael' and 'Fairy Tale', where it was the latter piece that particularly appealed to me. His later works like 'The Ripe...

Remarkably extensive though it is, the Discogs database doesn't contain everything, with its coverage of classical releases patchier than that of rock, pop & jazz ones. Had I continued to rely on the 'Random Item' button there, then I wouldn't have been in a position to write about this 2-CD Anniversary Edition album which brings together notable performances of half a dozen works by the Soviet composer Alfred Schnittke: as far as I can tell, no-one has added it there yet*. The album was released in 2020 on the Russian Melodiya label, intended to mark what would have been the composer's 85th birthday (but a year late for that). It's a handsome package with a very informative booklet in an unusual double-digipak which folds out into an L-shape. I bought it when it came out, being particularly interested to get a recording of his 'Concerto for Piano and String Orchestra' (1979), which I'd been listening to via YouTube. It's represented here by...

Alexandre Rabinovitch-Barakovsky is a pianist, composer and conductor originally from Russia and now resident in Switzerland. His compositions are characterised by a kind of minimalism that's neither quite like the styles of Glass & Reich nor the so-called "Holy Minimalists" among his Soviet-born contemporaries. To me his music seems distantly reminiscent of some of Michael Nyman's work. It makes use of repeated fragments of melody drawn from the classical and popular traditions, and often calls for amplified instrumentation. I first encountered his work on a CD called Pourquoi Je Suis Si Sentimental , as mentioned in passing here . Pura Cosa Mentale is a 2-CD album on the Belgian label Megadisc including five of his works. The first disc is dominated by a lengthy piece called 'Six États Intermediaires' which, a note adds, is "based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead". Its an orchestral opus, with, as its title implies, six movements. Notwithstandi...

On belatedly catching up with Twin Peaks: The Return a few years ago, in the middle of its very striking eighth episode where a slow-motion monochrome nuclear explosion is accompanied by the sound of harshly screeching strings, I recognised the music right away as Krzysztof Penderecki's 'Threnody For The Victims Of Hiroshima'. The 'Threnody' is among the pieces on this CD that I'd picked up in an anodyne small-town shopping-mall about twenty years ago. I'd been curious to hear it having previously read some reference to it (possibly by Lester Bangs) as an exemplary slice of horrible noise. I expected it to sound abrasive and discordant, but its expressive power caught me off-guard. It apparently took its composer by surprise too: beginning life as a something of an abstract piece, it was only when he first heard it performed that its "emotional charge" became apparent to him. The main part of this disc is devoted to Penderecki's 3rd Symphony,...

While resident in the US in 1919, Rebecca Clarke entered her Viola Sonata in a composition competition sponsored by patron of the arts Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. Out of a field of 72 entrants, Clarke's piece was adjudged the joint winner, unluckily losing out via Coolidge's casting vote to Ernest Bloch's Suite for Viola and Piano, a similarly excellent piece. Something must have been in the water that year, as it also saw the publication of Paul Hindemith's wonderful Op. 11 No.4 Viola Sonata. Might her career have flourished more fruitfully had she won? Perhaps, but the obstacles in her way were formidable: entrenched sexism; the demands of family life; persistent depression. Most of her major compositions date from the latter 1910's and the early '20s, with only sporadic creative episodes thereafter. I can't recall if I read about her work before hearing it or vice versa, but it was after listening to a movement from her Viola Sonata on BBC Radio 3 that I ...

Although the 'Etude sur les Mouvements Rotatoires' gets top billing, the main meat of this disc, and most of its appeal, lies in the '24 Preludes' that follow it, or, in full, the '24 Preludes in 13-tone diatonicised chromaticism in quarter-tone system for two pianos', op. 22, initially published in 1934 then subsequently revised over the course of the '60s. Ivan Wyschnegradsky, their composer, had been born in Russia, but spent most of his adult life in Paris. In the wake of a quasi-mystical epiphany in his youth, he felt compelled to compose microtonal, or what he sometimes referred to as "ultrachromatic" music. In practice, this most often meant composing pieces on a specially-designed piano he'd had made with two keyboards tuned a quarter-tone apart: for performances, in the absence of such a unique instrument, two differently-tuned pianos and two pianists would typically be called for. The theory behind the compositions is outlined in what...

Opting to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey on TV when I was ill with chicken-pox as a teenager wasn't the best choice, as the flashing imagery and discordant music only served to make me feel worse than I had before. If I thought about it at all, I may have supposed the more terrifying soundtrack cues had been composed specifically for the film. Not so: this was an unhappy early encounter with the music of György Ligeti. In 1999 a colleague was listening to something on a Discman-style personal stereo that provoked a variety of grimaces and, ultimately, a big smile. Upon my inquiring what it was, he lent me the CD - called Wien Modern - which included Ligeti's works 'Atmosphères' (one of the pieces used in 2001 ) and 'Lontano'. Startled and moved to similar facial contortions by what I heard, I would have bought a copy for myself had the album still been available. A couple of years later there came the first in a series of five CD releases collecting Ligeti's ...

The first of Alexander Scriabin's works I heard were some of his heady, mystically-inclined, later piano sonatas - of those, I developed a particular fondness for the 'White Mass' Sonata (no. 7). After those, encountering his earlier, delicately Chopinesque compositions took me by surprise. Side A of the present LP contains Scriabin's set of 24 Preludes (Op. 11, 1896) which are obviously inspired by Chopin's famous Op. 28 set. Despite the likenesses of form and style, there are, meanwhile, enough dissimilarities to prevent their seeming mere pastiches. Even if they're collectively not quite up there with Chopin's pieces, they make for absorbing and enjoyable listening. Side B kicks off with the op. 28 'Fantasie' written in 1900, which is still determinedly "Romantic", albeit with as much of Liszt in its heavily sonorous chords as Chopin. The remaining works on the disc (the two Poèmes, Op.32 and eight Études, Op.42) date from 1903, when Sc...

The moody, monochrome seascape on the cover, and the foreign title (without any direct relation to the music) signal to the prospective CD buyer that Serious Art awaits them therein. The essay in the 30-page booket by Tatjana Frumkis, given in German & English, is, moreover, a highbrow affair, quoting Pushkin, Hölderlin & Mandelstam. Sure enough, Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov's music isn't exactly a barrel of laughs, though some of it is undoubtedly very beautiful. The first piece on the disc is a 'Sonata for Violoncello and Piano' dating from 1983. For its twenty-two minute duration it alternates between fragmentary melodies and more harshly astringent passages, petering out to near-silence toward the end. Anja Lechner and Silke Avenhaus are the cellist and pianist. Next up, Silvestrov's 'String Quartet no. 1', composed in 1974. It begins with slow and quiet harmonies, but, while it continues in a mostly low & slow manner, conventional ...

While visiting the town of Kalmar in 2001, I bought a CD entitled Alina , on the ECM label: a beautifully soporific disc including a couple of performances, extended by improvisation, of Arvo Pärt's short piano piece 'Für Alina'. Was there other piano music by Pärt out there? All I could find was another short work ('Variationen Zur Gesundung Von Arinuschka') which I obtained on a CD, ordered on-line, called Pourquoi Je Suis Si Sentimental . This disc, of 'Post-Avant-Garde Piano Music From The Ex-Soviet Union' turned out to be a real discovery - an eye-opener - my first introduction to the work of composers like Alexander Rabinovitch, Georgs Pelēcis & Valentin Silvestrov; all performed by the pianist Alexei Lubimov. Looking for more music by these composers (and for more of Lubimov's playing), led me to Der Bote , another ECM release, one with a loosely elegaic theme. The album's title (and the title of the piece by Silvestrov that closes the rec...

I went through a phase, about eight years ago, when I downloaded (via less than fully legal means) a great quantity of classical music: so much of it, that I spent a full year just listening to it all, at the rate of an hour or two a day. One of the composers whose work caught my ear during that time was Bohislav Martinů, with pieces like his Nonets and the wonderful 'Fantasia for Theremin, Oboe, String Quartet and Piano' standing out in particular. Afterwards, trying to do the right thing, I began buying some of his music on CD, and, on a few occasions, was lucky enough to turn up an old LP of his work at a charity shop. The present disc, combining Martinů's 'Concerto for Oboe and Small Orchestra' with Richard Strauss's Oboe Concerto, I found at the Oxfam Books & Music shop in Cardiff. In Discogs I have my copy listed  as from the original 1963 pressing, but it could well be a later re-issue. The soloist is František Hanták, accompanied by the Brno State Ph...

I first heard Terry Riley's In C when I picked up a copy of the 25th anniversary performance on CD back in the late '90s. That version I admired rather than loved - at over 75 minutes' duration it just went on a little too long for my taste, and I seldom listened all the way though. The piece's opening 'theme' (if that's even the right word), hooked its way into me, however, and not infrequently comes back into my mind. When I learned that a version had been recorded by a group of (mostly) Malian musicians around the time of the piece's 50th anniversary, under the umbrella of the Africa Express organisation co-founded by Damon Albarn, it immediately struck me as a great idea. Riley himself was reportedly delighted by it too, saying: "I was not quite prepared for such an incredible journey, hearing the soul of Africa in joyous flight over those 53 patterns of ‘In C’. This ensemble feeds the piece with ancient threads of musical wisdom and humanity ...

I suppose this might count as a 'Greatest Hits' of Aram Khachaturian, featuring as it does four extracts apiece from his most succesful ballet scores Spartacus and Gayaneh . It's a 1971 re-issue of a 1962 performance by the Vienna Philharmonic, under the baton of the composer himself. The ballets themselves premiered in 1956 and 1942 respectively. It opens with the 'Adagio Of Spartacus And Phrygia', whose melody I'd known since early childhood from its being used as the main theme to the BBC TV drama The Onedin Line . The 'Sabre Dance' from Gayaneh which opens side B is scarcely less famous. I'd likewise encountered its melody in my early years thanks the the rock version by Dave Edmunds' band Love Sculpture. The other tracks are scarcely less arresting, with brash, up-front tunes throughout. The music is perhaps a Soviet equivalent to Hollywood movie soundtracks of the same era. I don't play the record often, but it is a joy, and I never ...

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 ...