Any other nutter fans of this great Russian composer? Am listening to Polyansky's fine recording of Symphony 27 (Chandos) with a fine coupling of the Cello Concerto (Alexander Ivashkin, soloist).
The 27th is a valedictory work, written when the composer was dying of cancer (he postponed an operation to complete the work) and , to add insult to injury, was under the displeasure of the soviet regime having had his music denounced (alongside that of Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Khachaturian, Shebalin and Popov) at the notorious 1948 denunciation of composers from party hack Zhdanov. Miaskovsky's creative reply was the 27th Symphony a work of great autumnal beauty and power which (ironically) received a posthumous Stalin prize for the composer.
The slow, movement in particular is terribly moving and the symphony (from 1949/50) is, I believe, the last great,belated flowering of the spirit of Russian Romanticism that had moved Glazunov and Rachmaninov to create some of their finest work.
Miaskovsky (or Myaskovsky) is the link between the Russian nationalist composers of the 19th Century and the great figures of the 20th Century like Shostakovich and Prokofiev.