Classical Music

The slow movement in classical music has many names: adagio, andante, largo, and marcia funèbre are just some of the best known. What they all have in common is their function in the composition scheme – as a centre of calm in a dynamic environment of allegros, scherzi and prestos which forces the listener to pause for a while and to allow a moment of introspection and contemplation.

In the 1920s, Bartók was at the height of his fame as a leading composer of the modern age. But this great international response had only set in after the First World War. After a period of initial, well-received successes, Bartók, whose style became increasingly uncompromising and advanced, had been more or less ignored by home audiences and performances of his works were also rejected by his fellow artists. Bartók for his part rejected the prevailing spirit of the times and waited several years in a kind of inner exile.

The three quartets on this album provide insight into the conflict Russian composers had with the doctrine of Socialist Realism. They display how a crisis due to political circumstances can achieve – per aspera ad astrum – new art forms on high levels.

In 1961 the then twenty-nine-year-old Yevgeny Yevtushenko published a poem entitled Babi Yar in the Literaturnaya gazeta. Babi Yar was the name of a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev which in 1941 had been the scene of a mass execution where, within the space of thirty-six hours, some 34.000 Jewish men, women and children were shot by a special unit of the German SS. In his poem Yevtushenko used the National Socialists‘ act of genocide as the starting-point of an attack on anti-Semitism in general, which he pilloried as a timeless evil that was widespread throughout the world, but which, he implied, was especially rife in Russia. Few Russian composers of the past were above reproach as far as anti-Semitism was concerned. Of these, the two that spring most immediately to mind are Rimsky-Korsakov and Shostakovich.

In this wholeness the album contains a rarely compiled collection of smaller masterpieces Edvard Grieg had composed for string orchestra. It is not a coincidence though that most of the pieces are transformations of initially different formats. Edvard Grieg was famous as a pianist and as a composer for the piano during his life. His studies at the Leipzig Conservatory with teachers such as Ignaz Moscheles and Carl Reinecke, who both were renowned as virtuoso players all over Europe, had shaped this part of his artistry. So many of his works were originally composed for the keyboard instrument which seemed to be the appropriate means of communicating the Nordic folk music idiom, which Grieg transferred perfectly well into art music.

This album presents four magnificent orchestral works by Mikahil Glinka, allowing an insight into his workshop at an early stage of his creative development. It reflects the encounter of Russian music tradition by form and genre – songs and dances – with the Italian art of singing – the belcanto – which Glinka became acquainted with during his years of travel. As of 1830 he spent three years in Italy to enhance his knowledge of the Italian opera. In this time he met in Milan Vincenzo Bellini and Gaetano Donizetti, getting familiar with the art of belcanto, which he later combined with the Russian vocal tradition thus creating the personal Glinka style.