March 2025 - Russian Symphony March Madness!

[ChamberNut]

As this last day in March concludes, I want to thank everyone who participated. In particular, to the nearly daily participants @Cato @Karl Henning and @hopefullytrusting 

And especially @hopefullytrusting , whom I was pleasantly surprised at his thorough diving in to the event!

I hope in the very least it was an opportunity for anyone even on a 'read only' basis to be exposed to some new works, revisiting a favourite recording or revisiting an old favourite work in a new recording!

Cheers!

[Cato]

As this last day in March concludes, I want to thank everyone who participated. In particular, to the nearly daily participants @Cato @Karl Henning and @hopefullytrusting 

And especially @hopefullytrusting , whom I was pleasantly surprised at his thorough diving in to the event!

I hope in the very least it was an opportunity for anyone even on a 'read only' basis to be exposed to some new works, revisiting a favourite recording or revisiting an old favourite work in a new recording!

Cheers!

Amen and Thank you!

For various reasons, I did not have an opportunity to hear anything this morning, and we are about to "hit the road" again in a few minutes.

Thus there could be a March 32nd or even a March 33rd this year, at least for this topic!   

[Karl Henning]

Great fun!
Prompted indirectly by @Mapman I was hoping to find the ballet version of Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements on youtube, but this is all I could find:

So, I'll content myself with Boulez:

[hopefullytrusting]

As this last day in March concludes, I want to thank everyone who participated. In particular, to the nearly daily participants @Cato @Karl Henning and @hopefullytrusting 

And especially @hopefullytrusting , whom I was pleasantly surprised at his thorough diving in to the event!

I hope in the very least it was an opportunity for anyone even on a 'read only' basis to be exposed to some new works, revisiting a favourite recording or revisiting an old favourite work in a new recording!

Cheers!

And many cheers to you, as well!

This was a very fun experience, and I also echo the sentiments of @Cato

[foxandpeng]

This will be my last contribution to this thread, as my birthday is on the 30th, so I will spending the weekend offline, and I saved a quite a banger for last, once again highlight that YouTube is the greatest website, bar none.

Gennady Vorobyov's (1918-1939) Symphony in C Minor (1937-1939; completed by Nikolai Peiko):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3pmX6cYvWI

It opens with such mournful, longing (I wonder if he knew his death was upcoming, I suspect it was - he died of typhus). Interleaved, of course - just like Schubert - are sprigs and sprouts of joyful exuberance. There is also a distinctly almost "oriental" sound to the music, but, ironically, it reminds me more of Copland than anyone else (the foreign but not quite so foreign).

There is a great use of silene throughout (in my field, we might declaim it as the mastery of the negative/white space, recognizing that the both the background and foreground are needed to experience phenomena fully. There is this eager playfulness, almost rollicking (reminds of a sleigh bells), but it always restrained, a bounded freedom.

The recoding is from 2011 with conductor, Maurice Yaklashkin and the Chuvash State Symphony Capella. Spring motifs "spring" about, alongside folk tales being regaled. Like Shostakovich's Symphony 11, it has an extremely impressive, and loud (boisterous) percussion section, and those are never not fun.

This does not feel like a first work, and I will admit I didn't look it up, but this might be his only work that saw the light of day. And what an auspicious way to begin, by getting the most difficult composing task out of the way first. He is serious though, no doubt, and wants to be taken seriously. I often wonder how one so young could even get a symphony played by a modern orchestra (I imagine being able to hear the music, textually, helps out a lot here - I cannot do that).

I will say you can tell where Vorobyo stopped, and Peiko begins. Vorobyo is closer to Mussorgsky, while Peiko is in similar begins (it happens in the final movement (not surpisingly), but Peiko is an able, capable, functional orchestra but he lacks the punch, the conviction of Voroybyo, which makes sense s this isn't his symphony, but he did a good job brining this to fruition (ha Wagner-feel/style).

High recommendation.

Thank you. I need to spend more time with YouTube and the range of music I don't know from there.

[Mapman]

Just barely in time:
Shostakovich: Symphony #10
Mravinsky: Leningrad

Not the greatest recording: audible coughing and some intonation issues. But the moment where the DSCH motif returns in the 4th movement is great!

[Cato]

Okay, March 36th is "not a thing," as the kids say these days! 

Nevertheless, for the first time in days *, I was able to listen to a Russian symphony, the Miaskovsky Symphony #21: a short work, which does compress a symphonic world into 15 minutes quite well.

For other composers, this might have been the opening movement: certainly it contains many seeds for elaboration!

* We are on the road, visiting our youngest son's family in Florida, a portent of the Apocalypse, where every forest, every swamp, every copse, every tree, every blade of crabgrass is under attack by the lust to build a mass of future slums, i.e. a thousand acres of 4 and 5-story apartment buildings without the roads and services needed to support another 5000 people jammed into an area already jammed with traffic, pollution, and the lunacy which accompanies overcrowding and gridlock.