The opening Piano Concerto (1946) by Shostakovich pupil German Galynin (1922-1966) announces that we are engaged in a fascinating, Soviet-era musical tour, mostly by way of personalities suppressed by Stalin’s regime. Both lighthearted and poignant, the Piano Concerto by Galynin immediately endears by virtue of its simplistic naivete and occasional, dark pathos. In three traditional movements, it captures the fancy-free elements of the Shostakovich piano concertos and Prokofiev’s D-flat Major Concerto; but the dark Andante indicates a deeper, melancholy reservoir of personal anguish, marked by piano, horns, and battery, including cymbals. The aura of sparkling playfulness returns for the regulation rondo movement. Lots of repeated notes, trills, staccato runs, and genial, upper-register flippancy of mood. That Galynin died prematurely at 44 and could have matured into a major talent is attested to by this bravura piano concerto.
The second of these three 1946 works includes Shostakovich’s own Third String Quartet, here arranged as arranged for strings, winds, and harp by Rudolf Barshai. The original quartet’s kinship to the wartime sensibility of the tragic Eighth Symphony has been duly noted: each has five movements, and at least one movement of each bears a fierce militancy. The opening movement’s seeming light heart is rife with undercurrents and mordant wit close to the spirit of Bartok. Grim repeated notes, slithery glissandos, and a fiery tessitura for the violas and celli in the Moderato con moto remind us of a world oppressed. The Allegro non troppo escalates the ferocity, almost achieving the musical equivalent of a goose step. Bravura string articulation, alternate arco and pizzicati from the Montreal players. The fourth movement is a grave passacaglia, a requiem for mankind. The last movement waxes philosophical, a kind of Shostakovich version of Schubert’s Wohin, whither humanity? The syntax occasionally gravitates to the “white” style of Stravinsky before resuming the unique sarcasm Shostakovich can express.
The solo piano’s thundering chords and long trill calls up the orchestra’s responsory for the Concerto by Galina Ustvolskaya (b. 1919), a pupil of Maximilian Steinberg, Georgi Rimsky-Korsakov, and Dimitri Shostakovich, the last of whom proposed to her. Hers is a high-energy style, infused with passing dissonances and buzzing effects which evolve into mystical adagios. There is a tonal stability in the work around the key of C, but not always clearly identifiable as major or minor. I would argue Prokofiev’s G Minor Concerto as an influence. In one continuous movement, the 18-minute work catalogues assertion, despair, and prayerful hope. The cadenza, as such, is a moody, introspective, grumbling affair; no bravura here. Then a long cello note opens a string dialogue with the solo notes from the keyboard; it finds extension and increased pathos, the Largo section. I am reminded that during the Koussevitzky premier of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, one listener leaned over to a neighbor and whispered, “Conditions must be terrible in Europe.” If these Soviet pieces mirror their times, what shall posterity say of them? Brilliant sound from Analekta, the recordings made 26-27 June 2005; and although not surround sound, the power of John Newton’s engineering had my system fooled.
— Gary Lemco
