Boris Lyatoshynsky (1895-1968)
Symphony No. 1 in A major, Op. 2
Symphony No. 2 in B minor, Op. 26
Symphony No. 3 in B minor, Op. 50
Symphony No. 4 in B minor, Op. 63
Symphony No. 5 in C major 'Slavonic', Op. 67
Grazhyna (1955)
Ukrainian State Symphony Orchestra/Theodore Kuchar
rec. 1993-94, Kiev, Ukraine
NAXOS 8.503303 [3 CDs: 189]
These three discs richly merit their reissue as a sleeved single collection. They have appeared before as individual CDs and before that variously from CPO, Melodiya and Russian Disc. The performances here breathe full emotional engagement; I need to reassure you on that point because Kuchar's Nielsen cycle (Brilliant Classics) failed to convince.
Boris Lyatoshynsky was a composition student of Reinhold Glière in the Kiev Conservatory where he became a professor in 1935. Alongside these duties he also held down academic duties from 1935–38 and 1941–44 at the Moscow Conservatory. As a composer his output is plentiful including five symphonies, several tone poems and other short orchestral works alongside operas, chamber works, songs and solo piano pieces. Lyatoshynsky was counted the doyen of Ukrainian composers and had numerous pupils over several generations. One of these was the Ivan Karabits whose music was praised here on another Naxos CD.
Although the score for the First Symphony was completed in 1919 it was not premièred until four years later by an orchestra conducted by Lyatoshynsky’s composition teacher, Reinhold Glière. It's a work that bears the impress of Scriabin at his most exalted, mystical and sometimes gloomy. Another composer who seemed to move in the same stylistic circles - but earlier than Lyatoshynsky - was Miaskovsky. The first movement ripples and rumbles with surging discontented writing of the type heard in Miaskovsky's symphonies 2, 4 and 13. Woodwind figures cut through the miasma and the music achieves a high-topped aspiring romance. After a swooningly nocturnal second movement vigour and brassy life return for the finale. This is now closer in style to Tchaikovsky in a Manfred-influenced storm. There's plenty of passionate superheated striving as braying brass, disrupted by bells, claws its way ever upwards. Try from 9:35 onwards and you'll get the point.
Grazhyna - a much later work - is a programmatic piece founded on Adam Mickiewicz’s poem of the same name. The poem recounts the tale of a Lithuanian chieftainess who battled with the Teutonic Knights (presumably the same ones who appear in Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky) and was eventually slain - echoes of Taras Bulba (Janáček) and Ilya Mouramets (Glière). The work starts with woodwind unfolding and rising free over a slow-moving, oleaginous cloud. There's a great climax with echoing horns at 5:50. The score is full of increasingly intimidating brass writing and fast trampling material. It ends in a flash of grandiloquence before subsiding into the sort of gloom familiar from Balakirev's wonderful Tamara. This is a work of sorrow and tragic heroism.
The Second Symphony, although written in the mid-1930s, remained unheard until 1964. There was about this score too much of gloom, negation and tragedy for the politicos of the time. In the first movement a big graceful and haunted melody is liberated with harp glissandi. The melody rises at 10:40 to a climax which manages to express the chaotic void and craggy triumph. After more helpings of intense gloom, the finale sports vigorous ‘whiplashes’ and sighing melodic outlines. Sound and fury make way for a glorious turbulent cauldron of sound
The Third Symphony was first performed in 1951 and was well received, although Soviet censors were dissatisfied. After revision it became accepted and even celebrated. It is this work that has been taken up by Kirill Karabits and his Bournemouth Orchestra: there is a Chandos CD (review). The first movement is pensive and typically gloomy. Then at 2:30 one of those life-shouting Miaskovsky gallop figures springs up. The next movement looms and towers but at 7:55 a gracious string melody, rounded and delightful, enters, topped off by an elegiac clarinet at 10:50. After a third movement, where the tension tightens, there is a finale with a reminiscence of the second movement as well as a large helping of obstreperous bragging. Energetic trumpet writing ushers in an optimistic military atmosphere and the last five minutes spell out an ending of celebratory hall-filling sound
The Fourth Symphony curves down towards 27 minutes yet still encompasses three movements. The composer’s capacious ideas provide emotional energy and kinetic impetus. There is a hint of dissonance now but nothing too forbidding, while the finale has jagged collisions yet ends with a gentle radiance.
The Fifth Symphony boasts trumpet-led grandeur - one of this composer’s strengths. Proceedings then take on a folksy forcefulness which becomes very strong and ragingly brassy at times. At 4:30 in the first movement a lovely sighing 'tail' figure is astonishingly romantic. The next movement introduces us to pensive - and even worried - woodwind writing, a rattling side-drum roll played pppp. The finale is exciting: Bartók Concerto for Orchestra meets Kodály’s march from Háry János. There’s a gentle ‘wash’ across the soundscape and some magical harp and solo woodwind wisps that oddly recall William Alwyn. Antiphonal brass calls at 7:40 presage closing pages of that sound at once folksy and ecclesiastical.
The liner-notes are in English and are by Theodore Kuchar and Marianna Kopytsia
These three discs comprising the complete Lyatoshynsky symphonies were first issued on full price Marco Polo: 1: 8.223542; 2 and 3: 8.223540 and 4 and 5 8.223541. The three Naxos discs continue to be available separately and are in very decent if not studio transparent sound.
Would that Naxos would now commission a recorded cycle of the symphonies of Andrei Eshpai (1925-2015) - a later generation than Lyatoshynsky but similarly gifted.
Rob Barnett
Previous review (individual discs): David Barker
