Here are two monuments of Soviet music. I hope
that we have learnt sufficient maturity not to dismiss these works
out of hand because they were written closer to the Soviet ‘heart’
than the works of outright or closet dissident composers now automatically
elevated because of their dissidence.
Gavrilin, who was born in Vologda, was
very much a Leningrad (now St Petersburg) figure. His television
folk-ballet, A House on the Road, deals with village life
at the time of the Second World War. There is nothing tough or
difficult to enjoy in this music. It is in some measure reminiscent
of the intensely melodic music of Kara Karayev’s ballet The
Seven Beauties and the more technicolour Hollywood sentimentality
encountered in the music of Eshpai (e.g. in his ballet The
Circle). There is the naïve delicate lyricism of Mother's
Song with its xylophone and celesta dialogue. Allowing for a tape
blip at tr.9 2.01 the youth movement is also highly sentimental
with a touch of Delius's Hassan Serenade for flute and
solo violin. At 3.43 in this track the engineers pull back on
the controls to avoid distortion at the surge of the orchestra.
In The Road (tr.10) first two minutes is taken up with
an insistent sword-wind of strings, steady, insistent, reiterative,
searching somewhat recalling Hovhaness’s writing in the Majnun
Symphony (on Poseidon). The waltz (tr. 11) features an accordion
and a guitar and has reminiscences of Ravel's la valse (tr.11
3.02). The music becomes by turns Mephistophelean, terse, rapped
out, tart and psychological in the tradition established by Prokofiev
in his grand waltzes. Gavrilin nevertheless maintains a light
painterly hand evident in the Tchaikovskian flute flurries. The
‘oompah’ finale suggests an affectionate tribute to Satie and
Auric - a sort of 1950s film music for a tour of Paris. Brashness
redolent of Malcolm Arnold and Shostakovich’s First Piano Concerto
blazes in great convulsions of unsubtle kitsch. The recording’s
live provenance is betrayed by the cough at 5.12. Gavrilin’s music
as represented here occupies a long lyric tradition which in modern
times has also surfaced in symphonies by Boiko (2) and Silvestrov
(5) and stretches back to the grand tableaux of Tchaikovsky's
three symphonic ballets.
Now to the Sviridov. I have reviewed some
Sviridov before. There was a Boheme CD devoted to his music. This
was recorded in the year of his death. The orchestra was conducted
by none other than Alexandr Vedernikov, the very singer who takes
the stentorian basso role in this oratorio. For the record that
disc was Boheme CDBMR 911108. It contained Music for Chamber
Orchestra (1964), Time Forward! film score (1967),
It is snowing - choir and orchestra (1965) and The Songs
of Hard Times (1998).
Kursk-born Sviridov has been a peripheral figure
for most even moderately well-informed listeners and collectors.
His Oratorio Pathetique and Song of the Forests have
been heard (the latter on an EMI-Melodiya LP coupled with Shostakovich)
but that is about it apart from the Boheme disc. Thankfully there
are now three Sviridov discs on the new and admirable CDK Music
label.
The Music for Chamber Orchestra is bright
and imaginative with hints of Shostakovich (with whom Sviridov
studied), Finzi (massed string writing) and Bliss (Music for
Strings). The six movement suite: Time Forward! Includes
a raw slow brass fanfare (Copland open-air style), a chattering
Prokofiev ditty and foxtrot with braying trombone and swooping
flute solo, a minatory march underpinned by a hollow drumbeat,
a nocturne incorporating a ppp elegiac trumpet figure of
understated power and a raucous ‘ironmongery’ finale alive with
the clamour of Shchedrin's Carmen ballet. Boris Pasternak's
three poems are deliciously set by Sviridov in It is Snowing.
The songbird-hearted flute lifts the mesmerising first poem with
its slowly descending flakes. The much longer Soul moves
just as slowly as the first song and its slow tolling is most
affecting. The three short Blok songs (and for that matter the
Pasternak settings) are indicators of Sviridov's pursuit of the
finest verse in the Russian language. Apologies for this aside
but I would like to remind readers of this attractive anthology.
The Oratorio Pathétique is
in seven sections. Vedernikov stands at the hub, orator, stentor,
goader of the people, defiant, courageous, rallying and florid.
He is the very embodiment of the Russian bass. He veers consummately
between sung heroism and bellowing, hectoring magnificence. He
can be compared with Boris Morgunov, the narrator in Muti's Ivan
the Terrible. The effect is heightened by the growling glow
of the massive choir (Grand Choir of USSR Radio and TV) which
also impresses through its blazing undistorted tone (tr.3 1.33,
1.48).
This music clearly caught the imaginations of
the audience some of whom might well, in 1979, have quietly thought
to themselves that this hymn to the dazzle of Soviet history and
sacrifice might be at just past zenith. The recording is extremely
capable and as secure as an Ingersoll lock. It takes in its stride
both subtle pastoral pipings (as in tr.4 00.12) as well as the
awesome tub-thumping of the first three tracks. That said there
is a momentary dropout in the left-hand channel at 1.38 (tr.4).
The tense and pinpoint singing of the dialogue of There'll
be a Garden City here reflects the remorseless industry of
a great and also ruthlessly achieving regime (prompting echoes
of the industrious machinery of Bliss’s Things to Come):-
A hundred pithead giants here
will burrow earth's dark womb
Here rows of factories we'll raise
...
Through siren steam will run
It is breathtakingly stirring music with many
subtle and instrumentally acute gestures. The massive and poetic
aspects will draw inevitable comparisons with Yuri Shaporin's
wartime choral/orchestral trilogy (now if only Relief would issue
that trilogy). Rather like Sibelius's Kullervo you can
easily get caught up in the action and want to join in the singing.
The pity then is that although there is a translation into English
the sung words are printed in the original Cyrillic rather than
transliteration.
The words are by high-priest poet of the Soviet
regime Vladimir Mayakovsky and, amongst much else, sing the praises
of 'Dear Comrade Lenin'. The Sun and The Poet finale makes
much play of darting, brightly excitable and celebratory writing
recalling the bubbling joy of RVW's Five Mystical Songs meeting
Prokofiev's Nevsky and Delius's Mass of Life in
the dazzle of upland sunshine: a damn good thrash and sheerly
magnificent.
I will make it a point of hearing more Sviridov
whenever I can. Here is a man at peace with the affecting emotional
language of the lyrical singers in Russia's artistic history.
Rob Barnett
TRACK LISTING
Sviridov - Oratorio Pathetique (1959):-
1. March
2. Tale of General Wrangel's Flight
3. To the Heroes of the Battle of Perekop
4. Our Land
5. There'll be a garden city here
6. Conversation with Comrade Lenin
7. The Sun and the Poet
Gavrilin - A House on the Road:-
1. Mother's song
2. Youth
3. The Road
4. Waltz
5. Holiday
Raisa Kotova (mezzo)