November 19, 2014

  • Naxos Reissues Important 20th Century Ukrainian Music

     

    Lyatoshynsky: Symphonies Vol. 2: Nos. 2 & 3
    Ukrainian State Symphony Orchestra/Theodore Kuchar
    Naxos 8.555579
    Total Time:  76:47
    Recording:   ****/****
    Performance: ****/****

    Lyatoshynsky: Symphonies Vol. 3: Nos. 4 & 5
    Ukrainian State Symphony Orchestra/Theodore Kuchar
    Naxos 8.555580
    Total Time:  55:23
    Recording:   ****/****
    Performance: ****/****

    Stankovych: Symphonies Nos. 1, 2 & 4
    National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine/Theodore Kuchar
    Naxos 8.555741
    Total Time:  70:07
    Recording:   ****/****
    Performance: ****/****

    Ukraine has certainly been a newly-watched country in the past year as unrest and Russian annexation continues to unfold the civil war that continues as of this day.  Perhaps capitalizing a bit on this recent awareness of the region, Naxos has reissued a series of releases from the Marco Polo catalogue (which themselves were licensed from another label) featuring the music of two significant Ukrainian composers: Boris Lyatoshynsky (1895-1968) and Yevhen Stankovych (b. 1942).  They represent two respected composers of the region whose music is essentially unknown.  Lyatoshynsky’s five symphonies are considered monumental works for the country’s musical legacy that helped set the foundation for future composers to build on.  In the 1990s, the Russian Disc label issued a series of recording with the same orchestra under Vladmir Gnedash made during the 1970s that were harder to track down and mostly overlooked.

    These are orchestras that are quite familiar then with the works they recorded again in the early 1990s.  The release of the second and third symphonies on Marco Polo was lauded as one of the best of the year releases.  It makes a good place to start if one wants to discover Lyatoshynsky’s work.  The recordings seem to be overall good transfers with excellent sound.  The low end may be a bit to much, though this is perhaps due to the writing itself rather than a flaw in the audio booth.  The imaging overall is quite good with a little dryness on the high end at times.  Still, unless one can locate used, or cut-out versions of the Marco Polo releases, this is a great way to explore Ukrainian symphonic music.  As these are reissues, I have decided to incorporate the 3 releases into a single review here so that they can be understood as being part of the larger whole.

    The Symphony No. 2, Op. 26 was composed between 1935-36 and revised again in 1940.  Interestingly undertaken as Shostakovich worked on his fourth symphony and Rachmaninov completed his third symphony.  Those contemporary works make for good references when one enters into Lyatoshynsky’s sound world.  The second symphony is a work that sits in a semi-romantic and modern sound world where dissonance is not necessarily the primary expression, but which is used within a mostly tonal language.   The opening movement starts with dark orchestral colors and builds in an ominous fashion.  The central movement has great beauty that is soon overcome by nervousness and intricate chromatic writing causing great musical strife and inner turmoil.  It has more romantic undertones but feels at times rather stark.  The work unfortunately did not fit the new Soviet “Realism” that also caused Shostakovich’s music to be condemned and was left unperformed again until 1964.  The piece is an overall exciting and intense work perhaps revealing the struggles and turbulent times.  When the beautiful thematic lines begin to unfold against more modern harmonic ideas, the effect is quite compelling, though sinister brass may hover in the background.  The final movement is an exciting and equally intense struggle with percussion and brass.  One can almost hear the Red Army enter in the final moments of the piece in chilling orchestral writing.  Listeners will be struck how the expressionist lyric lines fit against some of the harmonic writing and Eastern European symphonic traditions they are more familiar with as they hear this work.

    Of all the composer’s symphonies, the Symphony No. 3 in b, Op. 50, is one of the composer’s best-loved works and is also the most performed of the five.  Written in 1951 and revised three years later, it is a great example of how nationalism and expressionist styles are interwoven.  The revision was made after Lyatoshynsky was forced to change the ending and is another example of the suppression of creative freedom that was taking place in the 1950s under the Soviet regime.  For reference, the piece is a contemporary of Prokofiev’s seventh symphony.

    Unlike the previous work, the third has the more traditional four-movement form.  An opening fanfare, rather sardonic in tone, opens the first movement and will become a significant component of this work and the sense of struggle in the music.  A lyrical idea will also be overwhelmed later as well and seems roughly akin to Prokofiev’s work at this time.  A Slavic chant becomes the source for the third thematic idea intentionally trying to link the present with the past and is quite striking when it appears.  This past is maybe extended into the reflective, and somewhat ethereal, elegy that follows with an intense surging thematic idea that will eventually end quietly. But, not before another macabre march moves in relentlessly.  The scherzo provides an opportunity for exciting percussion writing in what seems like a mechanical age of false busyness that features a lyrical central section that keeps getting interrupted by the nervous energy.  That lyrical idea though feels almost as a dream in the midst of everything else that is going on around it.  The finale returns the fanfare ideas and one supposed that the anxiety of the first movement was to carry through to an angry outcry rather than the shift to a more celebratory joy whose irony may not have been lost to the Ukrainian people while still pleasing the censors.  The final bars are certainly quite in keeping with big Russian symphonic cliché endings, but not without just a hint of darkness which makes for a fascinating finale.  Kuchar’s performance allows the slow movement more time to unfold than his predecessor, Gnedash did.  His overall performance thus times out to a more expansive reading of the work, but is certainly valid and perhaps even more sympathetic to the style.

    Both of Lyatoshinsky’s final two symphonies return to the general three-movement structure, though certainly the multiple tempo changes owe something to traditional form.  The Symphony No. 4 in B-flat minor, Op. 63 is noted for brilliant orchestration while the fifth, bearing the subtitle “Slavonic”, incorporates Ukrainian folk music.

    By 1963, music certainly had taken important changes in the Western world with more experimental and serial techniques being lauded over more traditional and romantic musical styles.  Still, there are some interesting contemporary works sharing this period with the fourth symphony.  Among them are Britten’s Symphony for Cello and Orchestra and Rodion Shchedrin’s first Concerto for Orchestra.  With the fourth symphony, Lyatoshynsky’s music was finally recognized as important with positive critical reviews upon its premiere in Leningrad.  The work is certainly one of contemporary musical language and at times more dissonant style, though still hovering around tonality.  This sense of tension and struggle certainly is at the heart of the opening movement of the symphony as motifs are tossed about the orchestra which reaches expanded, dense harmonic points.  At the center of the movement, is a three-part slow movement where the composer incorporates suggestions of Ukrainian folk music including a chorale-like opening theme, a church-bell idea, and a seamless slow move back to the nervous and often macabre finale, though not without some moments of reflective yearning.  As in Shostakovich, the brass entries always feel as if they are coming to oppress the world around them and cause musical shifts that sometimes play off light and darkness.  The more expressive, and often angular themes are fascinating when placed alongside some of the more lyrical ideas as well.  The work ends though with a sense of serenity.  This is a brilliantly orchestrated piece that helps create an often fascinating dramatic narrative as it unfolds.

    While Lyatoshynsky spent 1965-1966 completing his final symphony, the Western world was being treated to a new rising compositional sound from Berio, Dutilleux, Penderecki, Lutoslawski, and even Corigliano’s earliest pieces.  The world around them may have been changing, but there was still a need to help assert national dreams behind the Iron Curtain as Lyatoshynsky also began to explore his nation’s musical heritage further.  The opening movement uses an ancient song associated with the hero Il’ya Muromets (the subject of Gliere’s third symphony).  Russian and Yugoslav melodies are juxtaposed within this interesting start to the symphony.  Block chords are beginning to appear as structural signposts in more modern ways as well, perhaps representing some monolithic blocks that force these other melodic threads into place.  The central movement utilizes Bulgarian folk tunes that provide a rather stark moment of repose as the first appears as a single line against a snare drum roll quietly underneath.  The finale returns us to folk dance and the world of the chorale.  The chimes seem to declare a sense of hopefulness, but all the surrounding material suggests otherwise.  One cannot help but think that this symphony is a commentary on the heritage of people who were forced into submission, and the fanfare ideas seem to recall the second symphony, and whose cultural identities were suppressed during the Soviet regime thus creating an interesting subcontext for this fascinating work.

    While the second volume features works that are probably easier for new listeners to discover Lyatoshynsky’s music, this final volume also features some great music to discover.  The craft of the orchestral writing is on great display and while there may be a sense of trying to compose to the politics of the time, there is always a deeper underlying feel of frustration, anger, and struggle that colors the resulting music in often fascinating dramatic ways.  These pieces feel much closer to the modernism of late Shostakovich and can be appreciated within that context.  Note that volume one, featuring the first symphony, was not available for review.

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    Yevhen Stankovych was born in 1942 and is one of many composers whose work stands alongside that of Schnittke and Gubaidulina as significant Soviet-era composition in the 1970s from the more avant-garde school of composers.  The three symphonies on this CD, previously appearing on Marco Polo, were completed between 1973 and 1977.  The recordings were made back in 1995 and to this day are the only ones available of these important Ukrainian works.

    The disc opens with the middle work of the pieces here, the Symphony No. 2 (1975).  With its subtitle, “Heroic”, the music is revealed to be a work of intensity and power intended to honor the dead while being a declamatory anti-war statement.  The opening movement features a troubled angular line and as the movement unfolds, Stankovych explores the large orchestra amassed here with a fascinating central section of individual solos and intriguing color between sections of the ensemble.  The longer string lines perhaps provide a small resemblance to Eastern European musical style, but it is a stark landscape that is uncovered here in the midst of an expanded percussion section.  The orchestral ideas here waver between more late-century style and more traditional ideas, but the music is monolithic at times as it gains in intensity in very dramatic, and often relentless fashion.  The juxtaposition of harmonies creates an often fascinating overlap of dissonance amidst the beauty that appears in glimpses.  The bells and chimes that sporadically appeared in the opening movement move us into the central largo with its melancholy string writing that unfolds as a passacaglia in a requiem-like atmosphere.  Throughout this work are some amazing flute passages that include bent pitches and other techniques.  The final very brief third movement is filled with angry chords and intense orchestral writing referring back to the opening.

    Stankovych’s first symphony was composed in 1973 and bears the subtitle “sinfonia larga’.  Set for 15 solo string instruments, it is in some respects a modern exploration of concerto grosso (similar to what Schnittke would explore) but with a deeply integrated polyphonic, and complex, writing style that might find its precedents in earlier periods.  The one-movement work is cast in sonata form and is filled with angular ideas and piled up chordal ideas that seem to collapse and build upon one another as the sound intensifies.  A central section provides a more relaxed moment, but the clusters soon recur.  This is a very intense piece!

    The final work on the CD is another single-movement symphony, the fourth, composed in 1977 with a subtitle (“Sinfonia lirica”).  The string ensemble is now expanded to 16 and is an exercise in Neo-Romanticism with interesting melodic ideas cast across the strings both vertically and horizontally that may recall Scriabin for astute listeners.  The music may have moments of sweetness, but the core harmonic writing and resulting clusters are perfectly in alignment with the other works on this disc.

     

    The music of the Ukraine as revealed in these recent reissues allows Western listeners to explore the developments of 20th Century music in this region of the world.  Both of the composers here are significant historically to the country but their styles could not be more different.  We see in Lyatoshynsky that transition from the massive symphonies of the 19th Century into that of the 20th with brilliant orchestral writing.  In Stankovych, we see that same amazing understanding of orchestral color and drama on display in very modern works that are intense, personal symphonic essays on a par with the more familiar music of North Western and Eastern Europe.