Alto continues to range freely among the labels selecting, mixing
and making new matches. It’s a recipe that works pretty well for
consumers and for them.
In
this case they look to the ASV catalogue
which if not deleted seems to be drowsy
at present. This collection is drawn
from four full-price Khachaturian CDs
issued by ASV during the first half
of the 1990s. They are ASV CD DCA 859:
(Battle of Stalingrad,
originally with Second Symphony); 773
(Masquerade); 884 (Valencian
Widow originally with Gayaneh
Suite 2; Danses
fantastiques) and 964 (Dance
Suite – in that case complete with
all five movements, originally
with Piano Concerto, Five Pieces).
The music from the
Soviet era of a son of the then Armenian SSR is vivid to put
it mildly. While Khachaturian wrote no operas he was active
in every other musical sphere: two grand ballets, three symphonies,
three concertos and three concerto-rhapsodies, overtures, marches,
hortatory odes, songs with orchestra, incidental music for stage
(20 plays) and screen (30 films), chamber music and piano solos.
His Violin Concerto won the Stalin Prize in 1941 and swept across
the world – a feted ambassador for the Soviet Union in the heart
of capitalism. The ballet Spartacus secured the Lenin
Prize in 1959. The great names among soloists flocked to play
his works. While the apex of his international success seems
to have been the 1940s his music has held its place in catalogue
and concert hall. Soviet recordings were plentiful but it was
only with ASV’s Khachaturian project in collaboration with Brian
Culverhouse and Loris Tjeknavorian that the less prominent works
made an appearance on record. There have been other discs of
rarer items from Naxos, Citadel and Delos but often these have
been isolated discs; nothing to compare with ASV’s sustained
effort.
The
wartime Masquerade suite is the
most famous of the pieces here. Lermontov
wrote the play to which these pieces
are extracts from the incidental music. It’s
burly and garish music with an irresistible
Soviet glare to the orchestration which
sounds a little like Capriccio Italien
on steroids. Two dignified movements
are placed among the super extrovert
standards. The central Mazurka mixes
Armenian exotic with what sounds like
the twirling parasols of a Savannah
Hollywood ball but transplanted to Yerevan.
The finale sounds a little like Vaudeville
meets the Folies Bergères – not so much
oompah as whoompah! The latest piece
in this collection is the six movement
selection from a 1957 production of
The Valencian Widow. There’s
poetry aplenty here as well as a lovely
boozy swerve to the clarinet line in
the second movement. Vaudeville and
Dick Van Dyke meet in the booted OTT
Comic Dance. The sturm und
drang of the Intermezzo acts
as a down-beat angst-ridden palate cleanser.
The very early Caucasian and Uzbek dances
already carry the composer’s hallmarks
including a fragile and trembling nostalgia
in the latter although surprisingly
there is also a touch of dissonance
– the merest dusting. The score to the
film of The Battle of Stalingrad
is typically heroic-tragic with
overtones of Tchaikovsky’s Manfred
but hyper. Invasion references
Germanic military band clichés. You
can hear a much more extended selection
from the film on a Marco Polo disc.
Throughout you hear an orchestra that
has not shaken free from the brazen,
brassy roar of a soviet orchestra at
full pelt. Glorious.
Rob Barnett