The program assembled here makes a kind of sense if you squint at it — four composers, loosely Russian or Russian-adjacent, loosely clustered around the turn of the last century. Loosely, I said. Miaskovsky’s Symphony No. 21 in f-sharp minor dates from 1940, which places it in a different world entirely, politically and aesthetically, from the Scriabin and Glazunov pieces that precede it. No matter. The hat fits, more or less.
Begin with Mykola Lysenko, which is where the disc begins, and where most listeners will encounter him for the first time. Lysenko deserves better than obscurity. The father of Ukrainian art music — that’s not hyperbole, it’s biography — he studied in Leipzig, absorbed the nationalist ferment of his era, and spent his career building a Ukrainian musical identity with the same fierce purposefulness that Smetana brought to Bohemia. The overture to his opera Taras Bulba crackles with genuine dramatic energy, its debt to Tchaikovsky audible but not embarrassing. The irony being that Lysenko refused Tchaikovsky — who admired the opera and wanted to stage it in Moscow — because a Moscow production meant Russian, not Ukrainian, and that was a line Lysenko would not cross. Principles cost. Stefan Blunier and the Beethoven Orchestra, Bonn bring reasonable conviction to the piece, and if the strings could use more body in the lower registers, the forward momentum never entirely collapses.
Then Scriabin. And here the problems begin.
Le Poème de l’extase is one of the most erotically charged scores in the repertoire — not metaphorically charged, actually charged, the musical embodiment of Scriabin’s theosophical delirium, his conviction that he was composing the universe toward its own ecstatic dissolution. It demands playing that makes you slightly uncomfortable. Nikolai Golovanov’s 1952 recording understood this viscerally; the tempos seem to breathe and dilate of their own biological necessity, the climaxes land like something physical. Blunier takes it all at a decisive, even brisk pace — clean, organized, professionally executed — and the blood simply does not race. The trumpet solos, which should sound like desire itself given a voice, come across as competent. The orchestral swells build and recede without the hallucinatory intensity the score demands. What’s missing isn’t notes; it’s the willingness to let the music become dangerous.
The brief Rêverie, op. 24 — a small, perfectly formed thing, barely six minutes — fares better, perhaps because it asks less of maestro and orchestra. Scriabin in 1898 was still partly a Chopin disciple, and this piece wears that inheritance gracefully.
Glazunov’s Valse de concert no. 1 in D major is delightful music, full of springy rhythmic life and a melodic generosity that Glazunov’s detractors always underestimate. But waltz music of this sophistication lives or dies on rubato — the tiny, almost imperceptible give and take in the meter that makes a good waltz feel like dancing and a stiff one feel like counting. Anatole Fistoulari, in his 1950s album now back in circulation on Guild Historical, found every one of those subtle inflections; his account is a lesson in metrical pliability, in how fractional rhythmic adjustments can make an orchestra sound like it’s breathing through the melody rather than measuring it. Blunier’s version is attractive but inert. The architecture is there. The life isn’t.
Which brings us to the Miaskovsky — and this is genuinely important, discographically speaking. The Symphony No. 21 in f-sharp minor was for decades his most performed work in the West, premiered by Nathan Rakhlin and introduced to American audiences on disc by Ormandy, later taken up by Morton Gould. It’s a single-movement piece, compact and concentrated, written in 1940 under the gathering shadow of what was coming — though Miaskovsky, characteristically, kept his counsel about such things. The lyricism is autumnal, sometimes achingly so, the orchestration lean and purposeful in a way that distinguishes it from the Soviet bombast the era also produced. Blunier shapes it with more care than he brought to the Scriabin, and the orchestra responds with genuine warmth in the string choir. It’s not a definitive reading — the climactic passages want more raw voltage — but it’s a respectable one, and for listeners new to Miaskovsky, an honest introduction.
This is a live recording, November 2011, and the acoustic is clean if not particularly flattering. The whole enterprise has the feel of a thoughtful regional orchestra program — well-intentioned, intermittently successful, unlikely to displace what you already own.
