Classical
UNG-ANNG TALAY
We're still catching up with the art produced in Russia during the first three decades of the last century. Modernist trends of different kinds had been making themselves felt during the years before the Revolution, and then went into high gear in the decade that followed. A muscular avant-garde appeared to create revolutionary art for the new revolutionary society, with innovators in music, poetry, drama, the graphic arts, and the novel hard at work breaking down the old boundaries.
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| SHOSTAKOVICH: Suite from ‘The Nose’, Op 15a; MOSOLOV: The Iron Foundry, Op 19; SHOSTAKOVICH: Act I, Scene 3 from ‘Lady Macbeth of Mtensk’. Tatiana Pavlovskaya (soprano, in ‘Mtensk’), Michael Hendrick (tenor, in ‘Nose’ and ‘Mtensk’), Vladislav Sulimsky (baritone, in ‘Nose’), Benjamin von Altrops (bass, in ‘Mtensk’), Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. DG Concerts, download only. |
Then, when Stalin lowered the boom on the country's dazzling community of creative artists, some of the century's most gifted minds had to work with the greatest caution to keep their ideas inside the ultra-conservative boundaries of "Socialist Realism", or else. This programme from DG's download-only Concert Series gives an idea of how daring Russian music became during the heyday of the revolutionary avant-garde, and concludes with the piece that brought it all down with a crash.
Salonen and his forces start the programme with a suite that Shostakovich condensed from his opera, The Nose, one of his most radical works. He adapted the libretto from Nikolai Gogol's crazy story of a century before, which chronicles the growing misfortunes of its hero, Kovalyov who awakes one morning to find that his nose has disappeared from his face and that the area between his eyes and his mouth are, as Gogol writes, as smooth as a pancake. This catastrophe would seem to be bad enough, but things get worse when Kovalyov spots his nose going into Kazan Cathedral wearing the uniform of a civil servant with a rank much higher than his own.
He confronts the runaway nose inside the cathedral where it is praying and "looking very pious", but the nose tells him to back off or face the consequences. Things get increasingly chaotic as Kovalyov's noselessness becomes an issue with his fiance (the phallic significance of the nose is not overlooked), and seem to start falling back into place only when the nose is caught trying to cross a border with forged papers.
A story like this doesn't immediately suggest itself as fertile material for an opera - for one thing, how do you represent the character of the Nose on stage? - but Shostakovich responded with a score as brash and perverse as the Gogol tale (for example, he instructs the baritone singing the part of the Nose to give his voice a nasal quality). The opening orchestral music, included in the suite, throws off a brightly lit spray of sound, a gong, a piccolo chirp, dissonant fanfares from the brass, and we are in a soundscape where Kovalyov's ordeal could take place.
Gogol's original story starts off with a henpecked barber breaking open one of the rolls his wife has just baked and discovering a nose inside. He wraps it in a napkin and throws it off a bridge into the Neva, but a policeman immediately nabs him. Gogol then lets the story collapse into a blur and restarts it, this time with Kovalyov finding his nose gone.
Shostakovich fills the blank space between these two incidents with transitional music scored only for percussion, a noisy orgy of rhythms that invites speculation on the nature of the nose's transformation. I think this all-percussion interval is a western musical first, unless the percussion orchestra for Stravinsky's Les Noces can be counted, as it predates Varese's Ionasation by a few years.
It is included in the suite, as are a mock-pathetic aria by Kovalyov (sung with just the right amount of exaggeration by Hendrick), a song by his layabout servant with a text by Dostoyevsky, and three more brief selections that give a good idea of the work's anarchic style. Still, the only way to get a feeling of the explosive originality of The Nose other than attending one of the rare full productions is to somehow get hold of the out-of-print complete Rozhdestvensky recording made for Melodia at the time of the work's first performances in 1974, almost half a century after it was written.
Alexander Mosolov's Iron Foundry is subtitled "Machine Music", and like Honegger's Pacific 231, Antheil's Ballet Mecanique and a few other orchestral showpieces of the period it uses the sound of the orchestra to suggest the noise of heavy machinery in operation. Right from the beginning, where the violas, playing a whining ostinato, make a sound unlike any other viola playing I've heard, Mosolov does evoke the rhythm and weight of factory equipment in motion.
The pounding percussion and crude dissonances, all loud and rhythmically relentless, conjure images of a super-foundry, bigger and more fearsome than the real thing. The piece only lasts for three and a half minutes, but it is a powerhouse. Dohnanyi's account of the piece for a Decca CD is a bit better focused, but this one gives all that the composer could have asked for.
Salonen saves the greatest music for last. The selection included here from Act I of Shostakovich's finest opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtensk, so enraged Stalin that he took aim at the composer and at musical "formalism" (translation = modernism) in general in a Pravda editorial that put an end to post-Revolutionary artistic freedom.
The music that made the dictator so mad was a passage in which bored and lonely provincial housewife Katerina Ismailovna is seduced by a handsome hired labourer. As she surrenders to him, the curtain falls and the orchestra cuts loose with a sonic description of volcanic sex that is even more explicitly rendered than Mosolov's iron foundry, complete with trombone glissandi that suggest orgasmic moans. To Stalin it was "pornophony" and the opera, after two years of successful performances, was withdrawn.
Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic are on fire here, but once again only the superb full recording, conducted by Rostropovich on EMI, captures the full dramatic impact of this scene. That said, soprano Tatiana Pavlovskaya expresses Katerina's loneliness and restlessness in the scene's famous aria as fully as Galina Vishnevskaya does for Rostropovich, and I prefer Hendrick here to Nikolai Gedda in the full recording.
Under the Shadow of Stalin can be downloaded from iTunes or from DG's website.
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