Nikolai Myaskovsky - Symphonies 2 and 22 (Gennady Rozhdestvensky \ Evgeny Svetlanov) - 1997

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Nikolai Myaskovsky - Symphonies 2 and 22 (Gennady Rozhdestvensky \ Evgeny Svetlanov) - 1997

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Nikolay Yakovlevich Myaskovsky (1881-1950), the Musical Conscience of Moscow, has been deemed by many as the greatest of Soviet symphonists. And listening to his symphonies, it is not hard to see why. Hardly free from the problems with some of the turgidness, redundancy, and plainness in the writing, his music is real stuff, hardly facile, and honest in its communicative utterance. He was indeed a Twentieth Century Piotr Illyich Tchaikovsky, not as an epigone, but as a man not afraid to express himself and at the same time allow his music to remain accessible.

The Second Symphony (1910) relates to the early piano sonatas (namely the First and the Fourth) due to the influence of Scriabin. The first movement is daring and powerful, with despairing climaxes and much of the Tchaikovskian and Mahlerian darkness and intensity. The remarkable slow movement (where Myaskovsky wrote some of his most deeply feeling, memorable, beautiful, effective, music in almost all of his symphonies) relates to the slow movement of Lyatoshynsky's First and Third Symphonies in its Scriabinesque mysticism and some of mawkishness in the writing that evokes Rachmaninov. The last movement returns to where the first movement leaves off, with the same level of intensity and pessimism that drowns whatever optimism the composer tries to assert in here. In all, this is a promising student work completed while Myaskovsky attended the St. Petersburg Conservatory of Music.

The Twenty-second Symphony in B Minor "Symphony Ballad" of 1941 was the first musical response to the Great Patriotic War (Soviet's name for World War II) and it is cast in three interlinking, continuous movements, all describing Myaskovsky's thoughts of the Nazis invasion on Soviet Russia. This symphony was not set to describe the War (a contrast to Shostakovich "Leningrad" Symphony), but was set to portray to emotional turmoil caused by it (like, for examples, Prokofiev's Fifth and Sixth symphonies and his War Sonatas, Kabalevsky's Second String Quartet and his Second Piano Sonata, as well as Khachaturian's Second Symphony). The first movement is serene, beautiful, and peaceful, but in a particularly uneasy atmosphere. The second movement (in a ternary form) portrays profound sadness and sorrow: the first part an expression of grief, the middle a depiction of an invasion, and the last a more pronounced anguish. And again with no pause, comes the last movement, which is perhaps obligatory in its "we shall overcome and defeat Nazism" rhetoric, but it is not out of place given the circumstances. I do have a feeling that the finale is perfunctory in comparison with Shostakovich's "Leningrad" given the arresting buildup in the previous movements. But in the finale analysis, this symphony is of real substance and depth typical of this composer.

The performance of Gennady Rozhdestvensky and his USSR (State) Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra is done with utmost passion and conviction in every sense of the word, and makes the best, most convincing case for the Second Symphony. And the same verdict aptly applies to the performance of Svetlanov and the USSR State Symphony Orchestra in the Twenty-Second. Russia Revelation's remasterings are more than acceptable, although the pitch is a notch higher in the remastering of the Twenty-second. A minor note to consider, maybe, but this release is very important, and beyond historical reasons.