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Messages - Christopher

#1
Composers & Music / Re: A Myaskovsky Clarinet Concerto?
Wednesday 12 March 2025, 15:23
I wonder if his family are aware?  Or his (estate) lawyers for that matter!
#2
Composers & Music / Re: A Myaskovsky Clarinet Concerto?
Wednesday 05 March 2025, 17:43
Another place to try could be the successor to Dartington Hall School where he seems to have spent most of his career.

According to wikipedia:

After the school's closure, a number of staff and students set up Sands School which still carries some of the principles that Dartington once had.

The Dartington estate also hosts the Dartington Music Summer School & Festival - which "was a department of the Dartington Trust. It was replaced in 2024 by ChoralFest"...these could all be avenues of enquiry maybe?
#3
Composers & Music / Re: A Myaskovsky Clarinet Concerto?
Wednesday 05 March 2025, 16:49
An obituary on MusicWeb says:

Although he won some success as a composer; with a number of publications and broadcasts, the fact remains that he was probably better known in Russia than in Britain, and in his latter years he worked hard to try to achieve wider recognition in this country, something which he never quite succeeded in but richly deserved.

https://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2003/Mar03/Moore_obit.htm

The Concerto for Clarinet and Strings is referenced here:
https://britishmusiccollection.org.uk/score/concerto-clarinet-and-strings-4
#4
Composers & Music / Re: A Myaskovsky Clarinet Concerto?
Wednesday 05 March 2025, 15:06
Where might one find the score of T Moore's concerto?
#5
Composers & Music / Re: A Myaskovsky Clarinet Concerto?
Wednesday 05 March 2025, 15:05
This is more plausible than some might think: when russians are taught the Latin alphabet, there is a very weird way that they write lower-case r. It looks like a curved v! See the image below, though that doesn't totally capture it.  (Handwriting is a very strict thing there, almost all russians have identical handwriting in both Cyrillic and Latin.) So not inconceivably a russian could have written Moore T and someone else read it as Moove T.

#6
The section of the review quoted by Alan above which is about the Barvinsky reads as follows:

Following her CD "Winter Whispers – Ukrainian Piano Tales" (2024), Ukrainian pianist Violina Petrychenko once again provides a feast for the ears full of new impressions of Ukrainian music with a world premiere recording. This time, together with Ukrainian musicologist and conductor Volodymyr Syvokhip  and the Lviv National Philharmonic Orchestra, she performed  two piano concertos by Ukrainian romantic composers.

This is how Vasyl Barvinsky's  (1888-1963) Piano Concerto in F minor sounds with the movements Maestoso, Andante non troppo and Allegro moderato. Barvinsky worked on this from 1917 until its completion in 1937. He incorporated Ukrainian folk melodies and folkloristic elements into his romantic-tonal music. After a dramatic introduction that seems to build to the highly dramatic, his music changes into something lively and lively, almost cheerful. The change in intensity from contemplative to dramatic, booming passages is impressive, interpreted with emotion and intensity by Violina Petrychenko. Everything is woven into a dialogue between orchestra and piano, which is subtly differentiated and recorded in impressive sound quality, making the smallest nuances audible. The piano's depth of sound, the melodic passages in the piano and strings, the imitations of the piano and orchestra alike, which lead to an echo effect, but also the thematic motifs that recur, are what make the piano concerto and its interpretation so appealing. The piano is ensnared by a warm orchestral wave in which it seems to literally unfold.


https://www.operius.de/post/ukrainische-musik-von-barvinsky-und-kosenko-l%C3%A4sst-aufhorchen-violina-petrychenko-bringt-2025-erneu
#7
The Barvinsky too - all its qualities are fully brought out in this recording, which was not the case with previous recordings, when it sounded more like a nice-enough piece badly played.  With this recording we can now hear what a fine concerto it actually is (and its story is tragic too - Barvinsky had to "consent" to the destruction of all his work, before being sentenced to a gulag in Mordovia: he recreated the score in a 2-piano version which decades later was re-orchestrated by others).
#8
I've always found the first movement of the Kosenko fairly Rachmaninovian, which is no slight to it as its own voice also shines through.  Movements 2 and 3 less so (and acc to the sleeve notes they were constructed many years later from Kosenko's sketches).

#9
Many thanks TerraEpon!
#10
I have two recordings:
- Andrej Hoteev/Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra Moscow/Vladimir Fedoseyev (Koch label), from a 4-CD box-set of all his works for piano+orchestra. The cover explicitly says "Unabridged original versions", so that seems to be clear.

The other is a Naxos CD, with Bernd Glemser/Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra/Antoni Wit.  Annoyingly the website doesn't say if it's the original or the Siloti.  Does anyone know off-hand? I've long since got rid of my hard-copy CDs and their booklets!
#11
My CD has just arrived, very much looking forward to getting home this evening and listening.
#12
Recordings & Broadcasts / Re: Crowdfunding query
Wednesday 19 February 2025, 12:34
Only that I've seen people in the creative sectors use Patreon and Kickstarter very effectively.

https://www.patreon.com/en-GB

https://www.kickstarter.com/
#13
Quote from: Alan Howe on Monday 17 February 2025, 19:03A thought: invite these Ukrainians (orchestra, conductor Volodymyr Svokhip and soloist Violina Petrychenko) to perform the Kosenko at this summer's Proms: they'd go down a storm.

Hear hear! Could it echo or even surpass that moment in August 1968 when the USSR Symphony Orchestra appeared at the Proms on the same day as Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring.

Quote from: Gareth Vaughan on Tuesday 18 February 2025, 08:22You think the controller of Radio 3 would have the imagination to do that? Dream on!!!

Perhaps we could design a Ukrainian evening for BBC 3 controllers.

Mine would be:

Lysenko - Taras Bulba overture
Skorulskyi - Mykyta Kozhumiaka (Mykyta the Tanner) symphonic poem-story
Kosenko - Piano Concerto
Bortkiewicz - Symphony 1 or 2
encore piece 1 - Skorulskyi - Adagio of Mavka and Lukas for violin and orchestra from "A Forest Song" ballet
encore piece 2 - Hulak-Artemovsky - Ukrainian Dances from the opera "The Cossack over the Danube"

A separate Ukrainian evening could be devoted to Gliere's "Ilya Muromets" Symphony No.3 (is that still the subject of the longest thread on here (deservedly so)?!)

I think I know Alan's next comment... ;D
#14
His Symphony No.7 was recorded with the Sczeczin Orchestra under the composer's baton; and his "My Grandchildren" suite was recorded by the Nottingham Symphony Orchestra, again under his baton.  His Violin Sonata has also been recorded.
#15
Glad to see that Private Eye shares our view:

THE [sic] Yehudi Menuhin School in Surrey is famous for educating children of advanced musical
talent; and for the past two years it has had an "associate composer" called Alexey Shor, described
by the school's music director, pianist Ashley Wass, as an artist of "exceptional craftsmanship"
whose involvement with the school was an "exciting opportunity".

Not everyone would agree. A Times reviewer in January 2020 described Shor as a "self-taught
composer" writing "would-be melodious 19th-century pastiches lacking all guts and spine". But
there's more to it than banal music, as pointed out in a recent investigation by online magazine VAN.
"Shor" was actually born Alexey Kononenko in the old Soviet Union and grew up not as a musician
but as a mathematician and eventual hedge-fund analyst who made a great deal of money - which
he has since used to pay for performances of works composed in his spare time.

In 2014 Shor obtained Maltese citizenship, a standard way for Russians to gain access to the EU,
and got involved with Konstantin Ishkhanov, an oil and gas baron who set up something called the
European Foundation for Support of Culture (EFSC), based in Malta. This funded a Malta
International Festival - to which western critics were shipped out expecting something Maltese, only
to find it run by Russians, featuring Russian or Armenian artists who played interminable amounts
of music by yes, er... Alexey Shor.

With bizarre quantities of money splashing around for such a niche classical music event, and half
the audience arriving in dark glasses and black limousines, it was, to say the least, er, an
atmospheric event. Just over two years ago the EFSC relocated to Dubai under the name Classical
Music Development Initiative, from where it now promotes music competitions with immense
prizes as well as performances of music by Shor and concert tours by pianist Wass.

It's all most... unusual. The Yehudi Menuhin School might do well to reconsider the "exciting
opportunity" of its ongoing connection.


(from Issue No.1635, 25 October-7 November 2024, in the "Music & Musicians" column on page 20...I wonder who writes that column?)