Leningrad Ballet Music
Boris ARCHIMANDRITOV (1932-2009)
Toulouse-Lautrec - choreographic poem (1970) [11:21]
Sergei SLONIMSKY (1932-2020)
Icarus - music from the ballet (1971) [33:54]
German OKUNEV (1931-1973)
The Overcoat (orch. V. Sapozhnikov) - music from the ballet (1973) [26:40]
Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra/Edward Chivzhel, Mariinsky (Kirov) Orchestra/Yuri Gamaley
rec. 1976-1984, Leningrad
NORTHERN FLOWERS NF/PMA99137 [72:15]
The Leningrad series from Northern Flowers continues to bear fresh blooms and, for the most part, sound well. There is no sign of the label’s fecund rate of production losing vitality. The label shows the same application and depth of reach that they did over their invaluable War-Time music series which runs to 18 CDs. Previous entries for the Leningrad series can be found by a search of this site.
The choreographic poem Toulouse-Lautrec, heard here in a live recording, involves a composer and, by natural extension, a work I have never heard of. It’s a bustly little piece the size of a concert overture. The score is riven with unruly influences. Numbered among these are Moulin Rouge, Respighi (in alluringly lush mode at the start), Honegger and Stravinsky They coexist and flicker in what amounts to a miscible vapour of oxygen and benzine - highly flammable. In UK terms this work should appeal to those who enjoy the neon and uproar of Peter Maxwell Davies’
Mavis in Las Vegas. That said, the piece ends peacefully.
The magnificently productive Sergei Slonimsky has appeared often in this Leningrad series. What amounts to a suite from his ballet Icarus lasts over half an hour and is in four distinctly tracked movements. The score is for a fairly beefy choir (deployed in the first and last movements) and full orchestra. The music dates from 1971. The movements are: I. Icarus's Dream; II. Forging the Wings; III. Solitude; IV. Flight. Unhurried Bergian ‘sunrises’, ecstatic but never effete choral contributions (a touch of Daphnis et Chloé), motoric densely detailed percussion, pensive interludes and hysterically driven material. The ‘Flight’ movement spirals higher and is lost in its evocation of happiness; there’s no despairing fall in this finale.
German Okunev - a Shostakovich pupil - worked on his ballet The Overcoat (after Gogol) in the last year of his life. This fell in the decade which saw the birth of all three of these ballet or ballet-related scores. The Okunev is heard in a completion and orchestration by Vladimir Sapozhnikov. It runs for just short of half an hour in a single track. The music is restless, and vacillates between tonality and atonality; though only a gentle embrace with atonality.
All three of these composers were born in the early 1930s and died, with the exception of Okunev, in the 2000s. These recordings represent them in sound that is never less than good and in performances that feel utterly committed.
As is to be expected with works of considerable obscurity to audiences outside Russia, the notes, which are in English only, are a good prop to understanding what we hear.
We owe it to the imagination and application of the Musical Concepts label that these discs are easily accessible in the English-speaking musical world. Long may this continue.
Rob Barnett
