Glière Symphony No.3 'Ilya Murometz'

[mbhaub]

The Scherchen is available at rediscovery.Us as a free MP3, or you can order a cd which sounds better. It's all legal - they made the CDs using LPs.

[sdtom]

This thread has turned out to be a real study of the symphony. I'm going to send my friend the Downes version and I'm going to listen to the Scherchen over at rediscovery.US. This turned out to be a real learning process for me and I want to thank all of you. I really appreciate this forum along with the members.
Tom

[chill319]

... a self-indulgently gorgeous apotheosis of Rimskian Russianness

Yes, those Scriabinesque harmonic extensions to the harmonic palette are gorgeous indeed, and in their day, like Tristan's harmonic vocabulary before, seem to have struck some as licentious. I think Glière brings something else to the table too, though. To put it in perspective, consider Rimsky-Korsakov's own Symphony 3. I count this as the most successful of his academic compositions, and one that I believe has more expressive potential than I have yet heard in recordings. (That Tchaikovsky, a better symphonist -- most of us will agree -- intended to conduct it on a date that turned out to be just a few weeks after his premature demise indicates his knowledgeable sympathy with the score.) Yet good as Symphony 3 is, within Rimsky's oeuvre, in my entirely banal opinion, other orchestral and staged works rise to greater heights of inspiration. The question is, why? And one possible answer is that there was something about the aesthetic framework of successive static "tableaux" that not only allowed Rimsky's superb sense of color a suitable medium but also allowed his artistic vision a framework that brought out its most characteristic expressions. (One might very loosely compare Rimsky to Seurat and Tchaikovsky to, say, action-packed Delacroix.)

How can one speak of such a thing as a static tableau in a temporal art like music? Metaphorically, of course. What I mean is that in Antar, for example, where Rimsky discovered the tableaux framework, themes may be seen through analysis to comprise various shorter, perhaps shared, musical motives. But Rimsky himself does not use his Antar themes this way; not as Haydn or Beethoven did in sonata forms and not as Wagner did in the Ring. Themes appear and reappear, rather like shadow puppets, in different contexts and with different colors but melodically unchanged. Process is something that happens around a theme, not _to_ a theme. The final effect of a tableau-based musical work depends not only on the quality of its themes and musical surroundings -- be they majestic or mysterious or exotic or charming -- but even more on the cunning with which themes and surroundings interact -- a different and perhaps somewhat less powerful creative challenge from making cogent Durchführungen but by no means an easy one.

One other short piece of background: and that is the evidence of Glière's first two symphonies, both tightly constructed in the Germanic manner of Tchaikovsky or Glazounov and the second having a real expressive weight that Rimsky struggled harder to achieve when dealing with academic forms.

What I hear Glière doing in his Symphony 3 is trying to find a way to integrate the Germanic and Rimskian models. I would venture to say that the length of the symphony is driven not by mere ambition but is in fact the "canvas" size required to give both the Durchführung and tabelau musical frameworks a chance to function effectively on their own, and also to intermingle.

Of course, Glière never wrote another work like this, and perhaps it can be said that while the work is a success the experiment wasn't. Then again, the Great War and Russian revolution changed so much it's hard to know just what Glière might have done in other circumstances, just as we cannot know whether Schumann's late choral-orchestral Ballades for Düsseldorf, which he considered a new genre, would have led to something more had he continued composing into the 1860s and '70s.

[sdtom]

The Scherchen is available at rediscovery.Us as a free MP3, or you can order a cd which sounds better. It's all legal - they made the CDs using LPs.

Are you comparing sound quality by wave vs, mp3 because you're spot on that this is by far the best recording. Wow. If you think there is enough of a difference I'll get the CD.

[Alan Howe]

...this is by far the best recording.

Hardly - unless you mean 'the best performance'.

[sdtom]

Of course I meant performance. And it sounds fine for an archival recording.
Tom

[Amphissa]

I'm not sure why, but I do not see the Scherchen at ReDiscovery.US. Of course, the audio transferred from record is available on YouTube for free. And the Naxos download (not available in the U.S.) seems to be from record as well, rather than from the original tapes. (That's by ear only, so may not be true. The tapes may have degraded.)

[Alan Howe]

The symphony demands modern recording quality. The Farberman performance fits the bill to a tee.

[mbhaub]

I'm not sure why, but I do not see the Scherchen at ReDiscovery.US. Of course, the audio transferred from record is available on YouTube for free. And the Naxos download (not available in the U.S.) seems to be from record as well, rather than from the original tapes. (That's by ear only, so may not be true. The tapes may have degraded.)

FIND the link for CATALOG, then CONDUCTORS M-Z. Scroll down and find Scherchen.

I bought the CD, and yes, it has greater depth than the MP3. Both were cleaned up rather well of ticks and pops - Westminster LPS weren't known for sterling pressings. For a 60-year-old mono recording, it holds up pretty well. Just don't expect the sound Unicorn lavished on Farberman.

[theqbar]

The Falletta recording of Gliere appears in youtube, i heard it, but i don't think, as other members already mentioned, that it can be a real alternative for Farberman (or Rakhlin, for me). That said, though, i 'm really glad she performed the symphony in a big city like NY. And, trying not to be off-topic, but has anybody had the chance to hear Ilya Muromets live?

[Amphissa]

Thank you, Chill, for your insightful and erudite discussion.

To me, Gliere's great achievement in his 3rd symphony was the fusion of Russian and Germanic styles. You'll remember that Gliere studied and worked in Germany during the years immediately preceding the composition of his 3rd symphony. While there, he surely absorbed the influence of Wagner and Bruckner, both of whom crafted magnificent works incorporating a "static tableau" form of presentation. And while there he surely heard the 2nd and 3rd symphonies of Sibelius, with their grand scene-settings.

His challenge was to meld these broad ideas into a genuine Russian symphony, imbued with the musical tradition you highlight, especially Rimsky-Korsakov.

In scale, Gliere's symphony is Wagneresque in grandeur -- completely fitting for a country so large as Russia. And the programmatic subject of his symphony, a heroic figure from Russian mythology, was the perfect choice.

Personally, I find the color and flowing energy of Gliere's masterpiece much more compelling than his Germanic predecessors. My one surprise, I suppose, is that Gliere did not include a role for voices in the piece.

I think this symphony could not have been written at any other time or place in history. I consider it one of the few genuine unsung symphonic masterpieces. Unfortunately, it demands a lot of time to perform and to listen to, and an orchestra worthy of its scale and demands. So it is not likely to make its way into the standard repertoire anytime soon.

[alberto]

Answering literally to the question in post 38, I did attend a live performance of Gliere Third in Torino, about 20 years ago, and it was uncut. Sincerely I am not aware of any other Italian performance.

[sdtom]

The symphony demands modern recording quality. The Farberman performance fits the bill to a tee.

I like a man who stands his ground to the end.
Tom

[britishcomposer]

I have just uploaded a late 90s life-performance from Cologne conducted by Neeme Järvi.
I don't know if it is uncut; it takes nearly 81 minutes.

Merry Christmas to all! 

[Amphissa]

At 81 minutes, if it has cuts, they are minor. Scherchen is complete. His tempi are faster than Farberman, so he clocks in at a swift 80 minutes.

I'm eager to hear the Jarvi! Thanks so much! A merry Christmas indeed!