Khachaturian and Lyapunov Violin Works – Hideko Udagawa

Some discs arrive on your desk like an argument nobody else has thought to make, and this is one of them. Nobody programs Lyapunov next to Khachaturian. Nobody, frankly, programs Lyapunov much at all, and there is something almost touching about a violinist deciding, deep into a career built substantially on Russian repertoire, to gamble on two pieces this far outside the standard rotation.

Khachaturian wrote his Concerto-Rhapsody for Leonid Kogan, not Kogan’s nephew or some pale imitator but the man himself, and Kogan’s steel-and-honey tone hangs over the piece like a fingerprint nobody can quite wipe off the glass. Kondrashin led the premiere in Moscow in November of 1962, and the surviving broadcast, tucked into that vast Brilliant Classics Kogan box, remains the yardstick, unglamorous sonics and all. The writing is late Khachaturian: fewer of the modal orientalisms that made the ballets famous, more of a craggy, improvisatory restlessness, as though the composer were working out something privately rather than performing for an audience. It does not offer easy pleasures. It demands a player who can make discursiveness sound inevitable.

Udagawa, alas, does not quite manage that here. The unaccompanied opening, bare, exposed, no orchestra to hide behind, comes out thin and effortful, the bow catching unevenly on the string, intonation drifting fractionally sharp in exposed sustained notes. It is not a disaster. It is the sound of an artist working hard rather than one inhabiting the music. Milstein, her teacher, built a career on making difficulty invisible. That particular inheritance does not seem to have transferred intact.

The Sonata-Monologue fares worse. Written in 1975 for Viktor Pikaizen, this is Khachaturian stripped to the bone: no orchestra, no cushion, just one violinist alone with roughly twelve minutes of increasingly astringent argument. Pikaizen’s own premiere disc, on Melodiya, has an angularity and rhythmic bite that make the piece cohere. Udagawa’s traversal, by contrast, goes soft at the edges precisely where the music wants steel. Phrases that should snap into focus instead blur. The engineering does her no favors either: she is balanced so far forward that every scratch of bow noise, every minute adjustment of pitch, sits under a magnifying glass. In repertoire this exposed, that kind of forensic closeness is unforgiving.

Things improve, genuinely, with the Lyapunov. Lyapunov’s Violin Concerto in D minor, op. 61, deserves far better than the total neglect it has suffered. Lyapunov was Balakirev’s disciple and eventual literary executor, a composer temperamentally allergic to the modernisms swirling around him in the years before the Revolution, and this concerto, completed in 1915, revised in 1921, sounds like a late, gorgeous echo of the world of Balakirev and early Glazunov: unhurried, richly scored, content to be radiant rather than urgent. The first movement has a long-breathed lyrical idea that could sit comfortably alongside “Stranger in Paradise” without embarrassment. Yes, that Kismet tune, itself cribbed from Borodin. Lyapunov’s material has exactly that kind of unforced, slightly perfumed charm. There’s a substantial cadenza too, the kind that used to be called “brilliant” without irony.

Udagawa sounds more at home here: freer, warmer, the tone opening out in the upper register with real sweetness in the big tune. The exposed cadenza still catches her out somewhat, a passage or two where the bow arm seems to tire, but the overall shape holds together in a way the two Khachaturian works never quite do. Alan Buribayev and the Royal Philharmonic provide sympathetic, unfussy support throughout, attentive and well-balanced against the soloist where the engineers allow it, and idiomatic in the concerto’s more sumptuous tuttis.

Anyone curious about the Lyapunov has a decent alternative already in Maxim Fedotov’s Naxos recording with Dmitry Yablonsky, which I still find preferable on balance: steadier tone, more command of the cadenza, comparable idiomatic feeling. For the two Khachaturian rarities, this disc’s chief virtue is availability rather than distinction. The Kogan and Pikaizen versions, decades old and sonically modest, remain the ones to hear if you can find them.

Valuable as advocacy, uneven as execution. Udagawa’s instincts for this repertoire are sound. Her ear for its idiom, its harmonic language, its rhetorical postures, is not in question. The playing itself, this time out, does not consistently rise to meet them.