BORIS TCHAIKOVSKY: Four Preludes for Chamber Orchestra; Suite: The Swineherd; Suite: Andersen Fairy Tales; Suite: Galoshes of Fortune – Musica Viva Chamber Orchestra/ Kirill Ershov – Naxos 8.572400, 56:51 ***:
Boris Tchaikovsky (no relation to Pyotr Ilyich) is one of those composers I’ve never got around to investigating, and the music on the present recording may not be the best place to start.
Written in the 1950s as accompaniment to radio plays for children, the three suites are based on fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen. You can have a bit of nostalgic fun turning to the Andersen Fairy Tales Suite and seeing how the music matches your favorite tale—the fanfare and march for the emperor of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is pretty effective—but not a lot of fun. The music is long on charm, to the point of cuteness, but short on the kind of sardonic wit and wild instrumental color that Tchaikovsky’s teacher Dmitri Shostakovich would have brought to such an assignment, though to be fair, Tchaikovsky was limited by his medium.
Given the small number of instrumentalists he was working with, he managed to inject a good deal of variety into the music. But the pieces that truly stand out, such as “The Revelers’ Song” from the Galoshes of Fortune, are few. This number, by the way, has some of Shostakovich’s brand of slightly outré wit, and it helps that a tipsy men’s choir joins the party. Otherwise, one piece succeeds another without making a very large blip on the radar of your musical attention.
The Four Preludes sound on paper like they would be more interesting. Certainly they have a more interesting provenance. They were originally conceived in 1965 as a song cycle based on poetry by Joseph Brodsky. This was a bad choice since Brodsky’s poetry was banned at a time when anti-Semitism was on the rise in Soviet Russia. Tchaikovsky’s songs were banned as well, not to be performed until 1988 and then in the city of Boston (which knows a thing or two about banning literature and such, according to the old saw).
In the meantime, Tchaikovsky decided to arrange the songs as purely instrumental preludes for chamber orchestra, explaining that “the genre of musical preludes—as happens in symphonic music—has fairly strong associations with poetry.” That’s as it may be; certainly the music of the Four Preludes captures all the lugubriousness of Brodsky’s verse. Here, unfortunately, there is painfully little variety, little color other than the prevailing grayness of Brodsky’s vision, which mostly involves the deadly and the dire. Some may find all this more fun than I do. Me, I’ll take Songs and Dances of Death or Kindertotenlieder any day.
While this music didn’t do much for me, I can’t fault the performances, which are thoroughly expert and committed, or the vivid studio recording. I just wish that so much talent had been expended on a worthier project.
– Lee Passarella
