Khachaturyan Suites – Stanley Black

Somewhere in a BBC sound archive there must be a tape of Peter Gilmore squinting at the horizon while that Adagio swells underneath him, and for anyone of a certain age the melody is now permanently welded to tall ships and Victorian shipping fortunes rather than to Spartacus and his doomed gladiators. Stanley Black knew exactly what he had here. This Eloquence reissue is cheap, cheerful, generously filled. It brings back his mid-1970s Decca Phase Four accounts of the three great Khachaturyan suites, and it’s a disc that argues, not always successfully, for Black as an unlikely champion of Soviet-era exoticism.

Let’s be honest about what Black was. He made his reputation conducting light orchestral confections, film scores, easy-listening arrangements for a public that wanted its Rachmaninov pre-digested. That background shows here. It isn’t necessarily a liability. The Spartacus Adagio for Spartacus and Phrygia gets one of the plushest, most unbuttoned readings on disc, string tone laid on with a trowel, rubato stretched to the edge of good taste and occasionally past it. Khachaturyan’s own Melodiya album is leaner, harder, more obviously Armenian in its melodic contours; the wide vibrato of the strings has a folk-fiddle rawness Black never attempts. Black instead gives us velvet. It is gorgeous, unapologetic, slightly ridiculous.

I found myself not minding.

Where he really earns his keep is the “Dance of the Gaditanes,” that Bolero-esque episode built on an obsessively repeated rhythmic cell, the kind of thing that can turn deadly dull in unsympathetic hands. Black paces it beautifully, letting tension accumulate almost imperceptibly, the orchestration thickening layer by layer until the brass finally cut loose. Few conductors manage that slow burn so convincingly. It’s the highlight of the whole disc.

The Masquerade suite is another matter: five movements of theatrical incidental music Khachaturyan wrote in 1941 for Lermontov’s play, later stitched into a concert suite that ranges from waltz to nocturne to galop with scarcely a modest bone in its body. Black plays it big and vulgar, and rightly so. This is music that wants a wink, not reverence. The Mazurka in particular catches fire, brass blaring with a kind of Offenbachian abandon, all Can-Can swagger and borscht-belt theatricality. If Svetlanov’s or Loris Tjeknavorian’s more idiomatic, rougher-edged versions strike you as too much, too Russian, too raw, too committed to their own vulgarity, Black’s smoother, more Anglicized account might be exactly the corrective you want.

Gayaneh is the real treasure trove, of course: five movements’ (well, more, depending on the edition) worth of tunes cannibalized from a ballet that itself cannibalizes half the nineteenth-century Russian repertoire. You can hear Borodin’s Prince Igor, whiffs of Ippolitov-Ivanov’s Procession of the Sardar, a Shostakovich fingerprint or two, even Rimsky’s Russian Easter Festival Overture lurking in the orchestral wash. None of this bothers me. Khachaturyan was a magpie of genius, and the “Sabre Dance,” present here in all its manic glory, has outlived every objection anyone’s raised against it since 1942. But the real find, criminally underrated even among Khachaturyan enthusiasts, is the “Dance of the Rose Maidens,” a piece of exquisite, perfumed lyricism that owes an obvious debt to Mussorgsky’s “Dance of the Persian Slave Girls” from Khovanshchina. Black shapes it here with real tenderness, letting the woodwind solos breathe, never rushing the melodic line. It’s a small masterpiece, and this may be its finest recorded outing.

Sonically, Phase Four does what Phase Four always did: larger than life, close-miked, occasionally garish, but exciting through a good pair of speakers. Whether it’s “authentic” Khachaturyan is a question that assumes there’s a single correct answer, and I’m not sure there is. Black softens the primitivism, files down the folk-dance edges, trades barbarism for glamour. It’s not the version I’d recommend first. Khachaturyan’s own remains indispensable, and Tjeknavorian’s Decca/RCA sets have a fire Black doesn’t chase. But as a supplementary disc, generously full at nearly seventy minutes and shockingly inexpensive, this is a genuine pleasure. The Gaditanes and Rose Maidens alone are worth the price of admission.