'Sidebars' begin for last week's post, 'One Sunday afternoon in August 1943 in Carnegie Hall . . . ': (1) Fun with Dmitri Kabalevsky

NOTE: As you'll see when we get to the gap, this is a knowingly "to be filled in" post, which gives us a chance to do, as it were, some on-our-own listening together

Kabalevsky (1904-1987) at work

-- from the Carnegie Hall program for Sunday, August 15, 1943

KABALEVSKY: Colas Breugnon, Opp. 24/90:
Overture


Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Fritz Reiner, cond. Columbia, recorded in the Syria Mosque, Pittsburgh, Mar. 26, 1945

Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Fritz Reiner, cond. RCA, recorded in Orchestra Hall, Mar. 14, 1959

by Ken

If you were here last week for the post in question, "One Sunday afternoon in August 1943 in Carnegie Hall . . ." [Nov. 28], you know that the date was August 15, the event was a New York Philharmonic "Summer Broadcast Concert," and that Fritz Reiner conducted a program consisting of the Overture to Dmitri Kabalevsky's opera Colas Breugnon, the Mendelssohn E minor Violin Concerto with Nathan Milstein as soloist, and the Shostakovich Sixth Symphony. And you know that we re-created the event after a fashion, though with the actual performance of the Shostakovich symphony that went out over the airwaves that day.

For the Kabalevsky overture we heard the recording we've just reherard above, which Reiner made a year and a half later, once Columbia Records made its peace with the striking musicians' union, with "his" orchestra at that time, the Pittsburgh Symphony. And for the Mendelssohn concerto we heard a 1945 performance when Milstein returned to Carnegie Hall to play and record the piece with Bruno Walter conducting the Philharmonic.

One other thing you may know from last week's post and the "pre-post" that preceded it, "Can we do a better job assembling the three movements of this symphony than, you know, the guy who composed them?" [Nov. 22], my main interest was the Shostakovich Sixth, of which we've also heard, in addition to the 1943 New York performance, a recording of the symphony that made in that flurry of activity when Reiner and the Pittsburgh Symphony were finally able to resume recording. In fact, the Colas Breugnon Overture was recorded as a filler for Side 8 of the four-78 set containing the Shostakovich Sixth.


IF YOU'VE BEEN HERE BEFORE, IT WON'T SHOCK YOU THAT
LAST WEEK'S POST PULLED MY MIND IN OTHER DIRECTIONS

It's kind of the way things tend to work here. Where my mind goes, the blog kind of goes with it. Those digressions, which go in assorted directions, were intended to be covered in a "sidebar." Or, as it turns out, a bunch of sidebars -- the material is just too sloppily diverse for a simple one-and-out addendum.

On the simplest level, we've already covered the first item of the agenda for Sidebar No. 1, emanating from the 1943 concert opener, the Colas Breugnon Overture. With all due respect to the agreeably slam-bang 1945 Reiner-Pittsburgh recording, it would have seemed inexcusable not to offer alongside it Reiner's later recording, with the Chicago Symphony, in RCA's "Living Stereo," albeit in mp3 form. We're reminded starkly of the leap in recording technology that occurred in the decade-plus that separates the two recordings. The 1959 one also has the advantage of (to put it starkly) a better orchestra, and the performance has all the crackle we could ask for in the piece's dominant driving sections along with a fine sweep to the lyrical countersubjects. If your first impulse on hearing it isn't to say, "Wow!," well, I don't know what to say.

WELL, WE COULD, YOU KNOW, LISTEN TO SOME
OTHER PERFORMANCES OF COLAS BREUGNON
(Actually, it's going to be worth our while!)

Like this one by Toscanini, who gave the piece its U.S. premiere in 1943. This April 1946 recording, which wound up being rereleased in a bunch of LP and CD Toscanini overture collections, packs a fine musical punch but hardly the sonic wallop of Reiner-Chicago.


NBC Symphony Orchestra, Arturo Toscanini, cond. RCA, recorded in Carnegie Hall, Apr. 8, 1946

Or how about this performance by John Williams and the Boston Pops? It sure packs a wallop (this Philips Pops Around the World album was produced by George Korngold, whose producing credits include the spectacular RCA "Classic Film Scores" series), and Williams may not have quite Reiner's finesse but he has the piece well in hand. Which I don't take as a negation of my point about the obligatory "Wow!" I just think another "Wow!" may be in order. (For my own sake I gave both performances another listen, and I'm not prepared to call a winner -- they're both winners.)


Boston Pops Orchestra, John Williams, cond. Philips, recorded (in Symphony Hall?), 1981

For some reason, the Colas Breugnon Overture is one of those concert pieces that bands think is right up their alley; the noted bandmaster Donald Hunsberger made an arrangement that seems to get a fair amount of play (and not surprisingly recorded it more than once). I'm more inclined to this British performance, which bears hardly any resemblance to any of the other wind-band performances I've heard. While it doesn't aspire to the piece's customary licketysplitness (note the timing), which we could be forgiven for thinking is kind of the point of the piece (no?), this enables Major Davis's Royal Artillery Band to articulate the thing so that not only is some kind of musical argument advanced, but it's one I think adds a dimension of grandeur to the piece, along with some surprising delicacy and even mystery in the intriguing little episode at 4:24. I expect I'll listen to the performance again, sometime.


Band of the Royal Artillery, Maj. T. S. Davis, cond. Bandleader, recorded in the U.K. c1995

In the liner notes for the Sony CD reissue of Reiner-Pittsburgh recordings including the Shostakovich and Kabalevsky works, Reiner biographer (and my old High Fidelity colleague) Phil Hart points out that the Colas Breugnon Overture was a crowd-pleasing favorite of Reiner's. But he also points to a larger issue, toward which you'll already have been pointed if you were able to read the reproduction of the August 1943 Carnegie Hall program note.

Maybe this is a time to call on my famous typing skills. (Well, maybe not so much skills as dogged persistence.)

KABALEVSKY          Overture to "Colas Breugnon"

(Born at Leningrad, December 30, 1904)

Dmitri Kabalevsky wrote his opera "Colas Breugnon," sometimes called Master of Clamery," in 1937, basing it on an adventurous novel by the French author and critic, Romain Rolland. Kabalevsky has written considerable music of revolutionary significance. One of his three symphonies celebrated the 15th anniversary of the Russian Revolution; his "Requiem" honors the memory of Lenin. Inspired by visits to the battlefront, Kabalevsky last Winter completed an oepra based on the Battle of Moscow. [This would be Into the Fire, the second of his eventual six operas, not counting a revised version of Colas Breugnon. -- Ed.] He studied composition with Miaskovsky, dean of contemporary Russian composers and most prolific of living symphonists. Kabalevsky's Second Symphony [at the time there were three Kabalevsky symphonies; a fourth would follow c1956 -- Ed.] was performed by the New York Philharmonic-Symphony last March.

Here's how Phil Hart makes the point in his Sony CD booklet note:

Reiner's mentor, the Hungarian-born Artur Nikisch, was renowned for his interpretations of Russian music (particularly Tchaikovsky), and he instilled in his young disciple a flair for the same repertoire. Reiner's early interest in the music of Shostakovich came suddenly into fashion when, during World War II, American orchestras vied with one another to introduce new compositions by "our heroic Russian allies" By 1948, Reiner had programmed four of Shostakovich's nine existing symphonies.

Phil notes that before making their recording of the Shostakovich Sixth for Columbia in May 1945, they had performed it not only that year but the year before, and we of course know that he had conducted it with the New York Philharmonic in 1943. Back to Phil:

American enthusiasm for Russian music during the war years embraced not just giants like Shostakovich and Prokofiev but also composers with less exalted names, like Kabalevsky, whose brilliant Overture to his opera Colas Breugnon was one of Reiner's favorite orchestral showpieces.

I'M NOT FIT TO COMMENT ON THE "REVOLUTIONARINESS"
OF KABALEVSKY -- AND THAT'S NOT WHERE WE'RE GOING

Kabalevsky at right, in October 1973, with fellow composers Alexander Sveshnikov (1890-1978) and Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)

Whether we're thinking of "revolutionariness" in the sense of musical innovation or the political sort, in the "Russian Revolutionary sense" that would have brought joy to the heart of that master of all things artisitc -- and everything else -- in Soviet Russia, Josef Stalin, I know too little about either Kabalevsky or his music to plunge in.

I really don't know his symphonies, though I've now listened to a YouTube posting of the Third (1933), from Eiji Oue's 2001-02 NDR Radio Philharmonic recording of the four Kabalevsky symphonies for CPO. This is undoubtedly the work the 1943 Carnegie Hall annotator is referring to as Kabalevsky's "Requiem," and it does bear the additional title "Requiem for Lenin." Still, while the second of its two movements (which run 19 minutes total in Oue's performance) indeed includes a choral setting of a text that I assume is a duly fulsome tribute to Lenin on the 10th anniversary of his death, this isn't in any formal sense a Requiem. The symphony is appealing enough musically, though I don't imagine audiences today would have much interest in that choral tribute to the dearly departed Vladimir Ilyich.

There is a Kabalevsky Requiem is sorts, from 1962, again not a liturgical Requiem but a memorial,in this case "to those who died in the fight against fascism," and it's a quite serious and substantial piece. (The composer's own recording, with the excellent mezzo Valentina Levko and baritone Vladimir Valaitis, is posted on YouTube in three parts totaling an hour and a half, starting here. It was available here as a two-LP Melodiya/Angel set, and I just never gave it any attention. But for now, I think it's safe to say that --

KABALEVSKY IS BEST REMEMBERED FOR HIS ABIDING
INTEREST IN MUSIC EDUCATION AND WORK WITH CHILDREN

“Children have always held a special place in my musical life. For me, there can be neither music nor life without children. I have composed music and written books for them, talked about music and taught at music schools, conducted children’s choirs and orchestras.” -- the composer

“Kabalevsky was a unique personality in international music and music education, whose greatest happiness was to write music for children.” -- internationally renowned advocate for children's music education Prof. Sir Frank Callaway, in his funeral elegy

It's this interest in music education that apparently prompted Kabalevsky, in the period 1948-52, to compose what amounts to a set of three compact concertos: one for violin, Op. 48; one for cello, Op. 49 (the first of what would be two cello concertos); and one for piano, Op. 50 (the third of what would eventually be four piano concertos). They're all fairly short works (they're in the 15-20-minute range), perhaps more like concertinos than proper concertos, but I've been having a lot of fun listening to them, at least in the recordings conducted by the composer, made shortly after each piece was written, and they feature, you'll note, a trio of superstar soloists, whose contributions have a lot to do with the pleasure the performances are giving me.

I gather that the idea in creating these pieces was that they might be suitable for younger performers as well as audiences, and I don't doubt that they could be handled by younger performers. But I doubt that they would have anything like the same effect, just as I wonder whether they would have the same effect in the hands of less capable and inspired veteran soloists. The composer was a sophisticated enough musician that I imagine he had the feeling all the while he was making the recordings, and after, that he had been blessed in having soloists of such caliber. You could look at it the other way: that these starry soloists owed him a debt of gratitude for providing them with material that allowed them to show off what they had. It may not be a coincidence that so far the piece that's grabbing me most is the one that fell into the arms of the greatest musician, David Oistrakh, who found in the Violin Concerto material that enabled him to be most fully himself as an artist.

So I'm suggesting that for now we all take the opportunity to listen to these pieces. Feel free to share any thoughts that come to mind.


KABALEVSKY: Violin Concerto in C, Op. 48

David Oistrakh (1908-1974): "Put a fiddle in his hands and he could make you cry, he could make you laugh, he could make you feel, he could make you think, he could make you see and feel as well as hear" (a tribute at his funeral)

i. Allegro molto e con brio
ii. Andantino cantabile [at 4:04]
iii. Vivace giocoso [at 10:28]


David Oistrakh, violin; USSR State Symphony Orchestra, Dmitri Kabalevsky, cond. Melodiya, recorded May 12, 1949


KABALEVSKY: Cello Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 49

Daniel Shafran (1923-1997): His collaboration with the composer in this concerto surely figures in how he came to be the dedicatee of Kabalevsky's Second Cello Concerto (1964). Note the distinctive tonal beauty, solidity, variety, and fluidity, not to mention the sheer confidence of the playing. (I was going to make a joke about that tie, but that seems somehow uncalled-for, no?

i. Allegro
ii. Largo [at 5:48]
iii. Allegro molto [at 11:18]


Daniel Shafran, cello; Great (USSR State?) Symphony Orchestra, Dmitri Kabalevsky, cond. Melodiya, recorded Apr. 27, 1952


KABALEVSKY: Piano Concerto No. 3 in D, Op. 50

Emil Gilels (1916-1985) has been turning up in this space so frequently of late that there seems hardly any need to say any more -- except perhaps that his playing could be so beautiful on the surface that it can be easy to miss how much is in fact going on in the depths.

i. Allegro molto
ii. Andante [at 6:18]
iii. Presto [at 12:30]


Emil Gilels, piano; Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra, Dmitri Kabalevsky, cond. Melodiya, recorded Dec. 24, 1954

[NOTE: Documentary info like organizational names and recording dates tends to be sketchy, even improvisatory in Russian recording history. In the above listings I've done a certain amount of best-guessing.]


NEXT UP (AFTER THIS POST GETS PROPERLY FILLED IN) --

If we go in order, it should be Sidebar No. 2, taking off from the Milstein-Walter recording of the Mendelssohn E minor Violin Concerto.

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