Rimsky-Korsakov Cantatas – Ziva

Rimsky-Korsakov the choral composer remains almost entirely unknown to American audiences, and this disc — assembled, oddly, more by accident of catalogue history than by design — goes some distance toward explaining why that neglect is our loss rather than his failing. Here is a composer whose orchestral wizardry we think we know cold, from Scheherazade to the Capriccio espagnol, turning his attention to cantata forms that Glinka and the kuchka generally treated as poor cousins to opera and symphony. The results, on the evidence of these four rarely heard scores, deserve better than the footnote status they have occupied for over a century.

Poem about Aleksey, the Man of God, op. 20, began life inside The Maid of Pskov before Rimsky excised it during one of his periodic fits of self-revision. Extracted and reworked as an independent cantata, it opens this disc with real dramatic heat. The Chorus of the Moscow Academy of Choral Art sings with a burnished, almost liturgical weight in the opening pages, and maestro Vladimir Ziva shapes the piece’s brief five minutes and forty seconds with more sculptural clarity than the timing would suggest possible.

The major discovery is The Song of Oleg the Wise, op. 58, a seventeen-minute setting of Pushkin’s ballad about the legendary prince and the sorcerer who predicts his death by his own horse. Nikolai Didenko sings the bass part with dark, granitic authority, and Rimsky gives him orchestral support of unusual imaginative range: sinister woodwind color, ominous pedal points, the apparatus of Russian musical fatalism deployed with a sure hand. Dmitri Kortchak, the tenor, is less comfortable. The top notes tighten under pressure, the tone thins when it should open out. It is not fatal, but it is audible, and in a work with so little competition on disc, one wishes for a cleaner top register to set against Didenko’s magnificent bottom.

From Homer, op. 60 — sometimes rendered “A Page from Homer” — sets an episode from the Odyssey, and here the writing turns more lyrical, more Mediterranean somehow. Elena Mitrakova and Tatiana Fedotova blend well in the soprano writing; Svetlana Sizova’s mezzo adds necessary weight lower down. Ziva keeps textures transparent, no small feat given how thickly Rimsky sometimes scores for massed voices and orchestra together.

The Mermaid of Lake Switez, op. 44, drawn from Mickiewicz, closes the program and is, on balance, the finest piece here: atmospheric, harmonically adventurous in places, with a real sense of watery unease running under the vocal lines. Sixteen minutes go by almost too quickly.

I need to register a serious complaint, one that has nothing to do with the performances and everything to do with the presentation. This reissue, pulled from Brilliant’s mammoth complete Rimsky-Korsakov edition and previously available as a stand-alone release on Chant du Monde, arrives without texts. The French and English translations that once accompanied the Chant du Monde issue have simply disappeared, and the booklet’s plot summaries are cursory at best, nonexistent for the Aleksey cantata. For listeners without Russian, this is a genuine loss. These are text-driven scores, dependent on the interplay of word and orchestral gesture in exactly the way Mussorgsky’s songs are, and to strip away the words is to hand over half a piece and call it whole.

Still, no other album gives you all four cantatas together, and the performances, texts or no texts, are sturdy, idiomatic, often thrilling. Khaikin’s old Melodiya account of the Oleg cantata, coupled decades ago with the First Symphony, has vanished from circulation and cannot have bettered this version by much given the sonic limitations of the era. Gauk’s historical account surfaces only within a ten-disc box; Svetlanov’s From Homer appeared later, in his own six-disc Rimsky survey. This remains the only one-stop source for this repertoire, flawed documentation and all. Recommended, with real enthusiasm, to anyone willing to read a plot synopsis alongside the Cyrillic booklet, and a gentle reproach to whichever hands at Brilliant let the translations go missing in transit.