Schnittke: Symphony No. 1
  USSR Ministry of Culture State Symphony Orchestra/Gennady Rozhdestvensky
Melodiya 10 02321
Total Time:  64:57
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

Although much of Western Europe and America seemed to see the symphonic form dissolve into 20-30 minute essays, composers in the Soviet Union continued to explore the symphony in its large-scale style inherited through Mahler and continued in some of the grand works by Shostakovich.  Such is the case with Alfred Schnittke’s Symphony No. 1 which was begun in 1969 and completed in 1974.  The piece is a practical kitchen sink of postmodernism complete with deconstruction and reconstruction, quotations, consonance and dissonance, as well as a blend of different styles.  The latter comes through in the jazz improvisational solos peppered through the work.  There is also a visual element to the piece which of course goes missing in a straight up recording.

The opening movement is set in classic sonata form.  The bells that open the work seem to immediately announce the heralding of a new era.  A variety sounds beginning to emerge from the resounding chaos that also includes applause and a host of other unusual effects and semi-improvisational ideas.  The music has this intense Penderecki and Ligeti blend with dissonances and unusual fragments and sound styles thrust at the audience.  It is as if Ives has returned!  The music continues this wafting back and forth between intense post-tonal music to sudden bursts of harmony as extreme edges of instruments are explored.  Solo ideas also seem to careen into the angular styles.  It seems to move in one direction only to scatter somewhere else as we see the form almost collapse in upon itself until we end up with massive moment of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the beginning perhaps of the collapse of ideas of theme and form.  It serves as a clue to what the work has been unraveling.  This is music that can be experienced quite dramatically and viscerally at first with repeated listening needed to explore the other thematic and harmonic components that make up this movement, and indeed the work as a whole.

The second moves into a scherzo with a sense of more genre styles explored.  Practically every dance one can imagine in a symphony appears in the whirlwind that is stymied by an odd solo for violin and piano.  It begins with a very Baroque dance but then quotes from the repertoire begin to intervene, like a variety of radio bleedthroughs into the music or some macabre nightmare unfolding.  The circus atmosphere also pervades here.  The third movement is an intense “Largo” that tears apart the emotional core of the form.  Then we are off to a finale that includes serial technique and further quotations from the repertoire.  Here the musical quotes feel like they are overpowered by the intensity and dissonance that blurs the romanticism for an earlier era.

On one hand, such a description that has been outlined above might describe an utter mess, but instead one finds a powerful philosophical and intellectual affront to the musical milieu of Soviet Russia and modern music.  Some have even seen in it a “chronicle” of the 20^th Century.  The music moves from one movement into another, not really paying attention to even these signposts.  Gennady Rozhdestvensky was the first conductor to bring this work to light and he is on the podium here for this recording made in 1987.  American audiences most likely will see in this symphony a kindred spirit to the massive symphonies of Charles Ives whose music tended to flaunt the romanticism of a previous bygone era as it also confusedly tried to pull together the music of Ives’ own times.  Schnittke does essentially the same thing in this first symphony with an eye to a much broader, grander symphonic tradition coupled with the frenetic musical styles that had been a part of the European avant-garde of the 1960s.  It is quite fascinating music requiring dedicated musicians to make it work as much as theater as music really.  The orchestra here manages to wade through this music well and the recording captures the sound quite well.  The real issue is does the work, or will the work stand the test of time, or be a curiosity.  As a herald to a new compositional voice, it did indeed create enough of an impression to firmly cement Schnittke as a significant musical voice for the latter 20^th Century.  As each performance will certainly be unique, those who are fans of the work will be able to compare to the few earlier recordings that do exist.  This Melodiya one is essentially one important document of the work in what was then the post-Soviet era.

Villa-Lobos: Symphony No. 12; Uirapuru; Manda-Cara
Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra, Choir & Children’s Choir/Isaac Karabtchevsky
Naxos 8.573451
Total Time:  57:42
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: (*)***/****

Over the last couple years, there have been several releases of Villa-Lobos’ symphonies from Naxos.  Those reviews delved into the composer’s life and music to help give it more perspective and readers are encouraged to check those blog posts out as well.

Some of the recordings with the Sao Paulo orchestra have obviously been a bit better than others.  The present release creates some additional interest by adding in an early modernist work coupled with his last symphony as well as a rarer secular cantata.

First up on the disc is Uirapuru.  This 1917 work is smack in the height of the modernist aesthetic movement growing out of a host of influences from Wagner, Debussy, and perhaps Stravinsky, but then adding in some uniquely Brazilian sound without specifically intimating folk elements.  The rhythmic ideas that appear early on certainly have Stravinsky’s style in mind often, though with slightly different orchestration approaches.  Some believe that the piece is based on an earlier work and then reworked to create the more modern style in the hopes that it might be considered by Dhiagelev.  The title is also the name of an Amazonian bird with an amazing sound when it calls that can be rather seductive thus lending it a more mythical feel.  Once the work was recorded by Stokowski, it became the composer’s first success, and most popular works.

Completed on his 70^th birthday, the twelfth symphony looked to the great masters of the form.  In this respect it ran counter to contemporary musical trends in 1957.  Not quite the “modernist” any longer, the piece seems perhaps closer aligned with Classicism, or the grand symphonic gestures that the Neo-Romantics were exploring.  The work is cast in a traditional four-movement format, though each one has unique aspects.  The opening movement blends a traditional sonata form thematically, but is treated more imaginatively often deconstructing aspects of a theme down to motives that grow back into more traditional lines.  It ends rather suddenly.  The slow movement seems to have a little Wagner and Stravinsky on its mind as an opening bassoon theme appears.  A fake flirtation with twelve-tone ideas never full materializes here.  But, there are several intriguing explorations of alternative harmonic ideas that explore quartal, chromatic and pandiatonic ideas.  Perhaps it is a more serious reflection on the progression of music during the composer’s lifetime?  The music does seem to bear a more mystical quality at times with its more dissonant reflective lines and solos.  The very brief scherzo seems almost a trifle by comparison, though it is in its own way a brilliant little showpiece for orchestra.  A rondo format is the underlying structure for the final movement.  Thematic transformation of an opening martial idea is one of the key marks of the movement.  A variety of themes and sounds seem to toss in all the ideas that Villa-Lobos perhaps feels he will never get to really explore in his remaining lifetime.  The result though is that the work overall seems to just meander a lot.  The ideas can be interesting and fortunately the whole piece runs less than 30 minutes.  It is less successful than some of the American symphonists writing in similar aesthetics of the time (Creston, Diamond, Harris).

Finally, the disc concludes with an odd secular cantata, Mandu-Carara from 1940.  The piano score suggests it might have been conceived as a ballet though no such performance appears to have occurred.  It was premiered in 1946 in Rio de Janiero and two years later in the US.  The concepts are taken from legends in the Solimoes River region collected by Barbosa Sobrinho.  The title is the name of the god of dance and so the piece does have this interesting folkloric quality.  Sometimes the music itself feels more like it takes a few pages from Jazz rhythms and styles.  The adult choral writing is more solemn with the children’s chorus adding contrast with lighter musical styles.  The music is rather fascinating if sometimes grandly scored with many lines creating often interesting musical textures.  The train-like section towards the end is filled with exciting sounds and techniques.

I am not quite sure that this recording will supercede Carl St. Clair’s cycle.  What the Naxos disc has going for it is the program itself: three distinct works from different periods in  Villa-Lobos’ life.  The opening piece is well played.  The symphony sometimes feels a bit underwhelming at times, which may be part of the music’s trouble as well, but it feels a bit more like a run through and a bit distant—though again, this is also part of the general aesthetic inherent in the work itself.  So it may leave you a bit cold at first.  The final piece certainly brings us back to more familiar musical territory with lots of color and is well recorded.  Overall, an interesting release for Villa-Lobos enthusiasts but not necessarily the place to start exploring the composer’s symphony output.