Vissarion Shebalin: Orchestral
Music, Volume One—Suites Nos. 1 and 2. Siberian Symphony Orchestra
conducted by Dmitry Vasiliev. Toccata Classics. $18.99.
Weinberg: Symphony No. 19,
“Bright May”; The Banners of Peace. St. Petersburg State Symphony Orchestra
conducted by Vladimir Lande. Naxos. $9.99.
Elgar: The Starlight Express;
Suite from “The Starlight Express”; Clive Carey: Three Songs from “The
Starlight Express.” Elin Manahan Thomas, soprano; Roderick Williams, baritone;
Simon Callow, narrator; Scottish Chamber Orchestra conducted by Sir Andrew
Davis. Chandos. $29.99 (2 SACDs).
Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 5;
Elgar: Cockaigne (In London Town); Britten: Four Sea Interludes and Passacaglia
from “Peter Grimes.” Oregon Symphony conducted by Carlos Kalmar. PentaTone.
$19.99 (SACD).
It would be facile and
unfair to try to encapsulate any nation’s “personality” by means of its music –
and even more unfair to do so using the works of just a few composers.
Listeners nevertheless tend to do that all the time – for example, considering
Tchaikovsky and the five “Mighty Handful” composers to be emblematic of Russia
in the 19th century, and Shostakovich and Prokofiev to sum up Soviet
times in the 20th. But there
are other composers whose works are just as firmly tied to Russia as are these
very well-known ones, and a few of them are finally starting to get some
recognition outside their homeland.
Vissarion Shebalin (1902-1963) and Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-1996), both friends and colleagues of
Shostakovich, are two of them. Shebalin’s relationship with Shostakovich was
particularly close, and Shebalin’s Suite No. 1 is dedicated to Shostakovich’s
friend and secretary, Lev Atovmian. On the basis of the recording by the
Siberian Symphony Orchestra under Dmitry Vasiliev – the first this work has
ever received – Shebalin had as sure a sense of theater as did Shostakovich
himself. This suite and its successor
are both collections of theatrical pieces, the six-movement Suite No. 1 starting
with a suitably mournful funeral march and containing two waltzes (one
designated “Slow Waltz”). This is, of
course, not symphonically organized music, so it lacks a certain degree of
cohesiveness, but it is very effective in conveying theatrically superficial
emotion, and the orchestration, which includes some highly chromatic writing
for clarinet and saxophone, is particularly fine. Suite No. 1 dates to 1934 and No. 2 to a year
later, but Shebalin revisited and revised both works as late as 1962. Suite No. 2, in eight movements, is based on
Shebalin’s incidental music for La Dame
aux camélias, better known as the inspiration for Verdi’s La Traviata. Shebalin starts the suite with a waltz and
includes two additional ones (one marked “Slow” and one labeled
“Romantic”). The music has a
more-international flavor than might be expected from the French story: Italian
and Spanish elements (a Tarantella and Bolero) give it considerable character. Like Suite No. 1, this is a disconnected work
rather than a closely integrated one, but also like the first suite, it shows
considerable skill in orchestration and close attention to theatrical effectiveness. This is the first volume of Shebalin’s music
from Toccata Classics, and it certainly whets the appetite for more.
Weinberg is already
undergoing something of a rediscovery, with Naxos in the forefront of release
of his music. Weinberg wrote a
surprisingly large number of symphonies: 26, compared with 15 for Shostakovich
and just eight for Prokofiev (counting the two versions of his No. 4). So the symphonies are bound to be the
centerpiece of any Weinberg series. The reason for their release in Naxos’
order, though, remains obscure: the first to come out was No. 6, and now the
St. Petersburg State Symphony Orchestra under Vladimir Lande offers No. 19, a
work from 1985 that bears the title “Bright May” or “Joyous May.” Far from a May Day piece celebrating
socialist realism, the symphony refers in its title to the end of the Great
Patriotic War, as World War II is still called in Russia and parts of the
former Soviet Union. Weinberg does not make
the work wholly celebratory, however – although he does not cock a snook at the
government as Shostakovich did in his postwar Symphony No. 9. Weinberg mixes the celebratory with the
apprehensive, using woodwinds in particular for ominous passages and having the
finale, after triumphal elements in its early going, eventually fade away to
nothingness – a technique reminiscent of Shostakovich’s. The symphony is paired on this CD with The Banners of Peace, a celebratory work
written just after Symphony No. 19 and dedicated to the 27th
Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. Yet
the work is not as bland and propagandistic as its provenance might suggest. It
is essentially positive and forthright, but it also includes some traditional
and revolutionary songs (some of which Shostakovich also used, in his Symphony
No. 11) that enrich the texture. It does, however, end in a burst of
affirmation that surely pleased the party bosses when the work was first
performed in Moscow in 1986.
If Shebalin and
Weinberg are lesser lights in 20th-century Russian music, Elgar and
Vaughan Williams are among the brightest in England’s. But not all their works are familiar, and
some are downright obscure. The Starlight
Express is one such, and a strange (albeit intriguing and often involving)
piece it is. The title is that of a play
by Violet Pearn, based on a novel by Algernon Blackwood called A Prisoner in Fairyland. This is a work of
World War I and was a dismal failure at and after its debut in December 1915.
Elgar and Blackwood were both dissatisfied with the work’s staging even before
the première, but they remained
reticent about their unhappiness and the piece closed after only one
month. The music, though, came in for
considerable praise at the time, and Elgar was fond enough of it to arrange for
it to be recorded in February 1916, just weeks after the play itself shut down. Elgar incorporated some music from his Wand of Youth and Music Makers into The
Starlight Express, and ended the three-act work by including the Christmas
carol, The First Nowell. The composition as a whole is a children’s
play with songs, with Elgar providing instrumental music as well as pieces to
be sung by such characters as the Organ Grinder and the Laugher. It is a simple, sweet and rather cloying play
that includes a father who is an unsuccessful author, a widow and pension manager whose guests do not pay,
an elderly woman searching for her long-lost brother, and similar
characters. This is certainly not great
Elgar, but it is quite charming, sometimes in spite of itself, and the
recording by Sir Andrew Davis and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra is a première on multiple levels: the first
recording of the whole play in this version (with the action carried forth
through narration written by Davis); the first recording ever of the suite
(which Davis arranged); and the first recording of three songs in versions by
Clive Carey (1883-1968), who was originally going to be the composer of the
play’s incidental music – orchestrated by Davis. The 45-minute suite, which includes songs and
music without narration, is more listenable than the narrated play as a whole,
which partakes of some almost-mystical wish fulfillment but really does not
have much to recommend it from the standpoint of content. By focusing on Elgar’s music, Davis’s suite
bears more repeated hearings. In the full
version of The Starlight Express, the
singing is quite fine, and the very extensive narration is feelingly delivered
in a way that is wholly appropriate to the material, but there is an
inescapable feeling that if the narrator stopped talking, the music (although
always intended to be heard behind dialogue) would be of greater interest. If the totality of this very well-produced two-SACD
set pays perhaps a little too much attention to a work that, while worthy, is
scarcely of the first water, it is nevertheless a delight to have a wholly
engaging performance of The Starlight
Express available to shed some light on aspects of Elgar’s output to which
very little attention is ever paid.
If The Starlight Express is unfamiliar,
Elgar’s Cockaigne overture is so
well-known as almost to be overplayed, although its portrait of London at the
turn of the 20th century remains as robust and attractive as
ever. This work opens a rather curious
(+++) PentaTone SACD featuring the Oregon Symphony under Carlos Kalmar
performing well-known British works in less-than-idiomatic fashion. Certainly Kalmar and the orchestra give Cockaigne a go with spirit and
enthusiasm, but the flavor of Elgar and London is missing – the performance,
despite the excellent sound, is rather bland. The same is true of their
rendition of Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 5, a particularly difficult work to
bring off because it is nearly all very quiet (few passages even rise to the
level of forte) and marks a return to
the style of the composer’s Symphony No. 3 (“Pastoral”) after the extremely
hectic and dissonant No. 4. It is as if
Kalmar and his orchestra do not really know the context of this work and are
simply playing it as a fairly interesting and (because of its dynamics) fairly
unusual symphony, but without significant sensitivity to the nuances of the
piece or its primarily modal structure.
There is no specific problem with this performance, but neither is there
any specific reason to recommend it. The best readings on the disc are of the
excerpts from Britten’s Peter Grimes,
which, despite the opera’s very British setting, speak a more universally
accessible language than that of the Elgar and Vaughan Williams works heard
here. The scene-painting of “Moonlight”
and “Storm” is particularly well handled, and the five excerpts (the other
three being “Dawn,” “Sunday morning” and the passacaglia) come across as
individual miniature tone poems, impressionistic and structurally
effective. The SACD’s title, This England, is, under the
circumstances, a bit of a misnomer, since it is more that England, as viewed from across the pond by very competent
musicians who are but slightly attuned to the foundational Englishness of much
of the music they perform.
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