Symphony Preview: From Russia, with love

The Russian government may be stinking up the place right now, but that’s no reason not to appreciate the all-Russian program Thomas Søndergård will conduct in his debut. Sir Stephen Hough will be the soloist for Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, and the orchestra will play works by Prokofiev and Anatoly Liadov.

[Preview the music with the SLSO's commercial-free Spotify playlist.]

Anatoly Liadov en.wikipedia.org

If you’ve never heard of Liadov, that’s hardly surprising. Although he studied composition with no less than Nikolay Rimski-Korsakov at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, he was, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “expelled for idleness in 1876.” He would eventually complete his education and even teach at the Conservatory, where his students would include Prokofiev.

And what did Prokofiev think of his mentor? Based on what he wrote in his autobiography (published in the West as “Prokofiev by Prokofiev: A Composer’s Memoir” in 1979) the answer is: not much. “He was a rather lazy man,” wrote the composer, “and in no hurry to start teaching… He regarded teaching at the Conservatory as a burdensome duty and showed no interest in his students.”

Liadov's laziness (and resulting unreliability) essentially conspired with his self-criticism to prevent him from producing a large body of work, although he did write a number of piano miniatures (his 1893 "Musical Snuffbox" still regularly shows up as an encore piece). Even so, he became associated with (if not an actual member of) the "Mighty Handful" (a.k.a. the "Russian Five") of composers who were so important in the formation of the Russian nationalist school. The actual five were Mily Balakirev (composer of the fiendishly difficult "Islamey" for piano), César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Alexander Borodin.

Appropriately for a Russian nationalist, Liadov is represented this weekend by "The Enchanted Lake" (Op. 62), one of two orchestral miniatures based on Russian folklore (the other is "Kikimora" Op. 63) that were part of sketches for an opera he never got around to writing. It’s a neat piece of work in which the harp, strings, and woodwinds suggest a quiet lake that might or might not have something unpleasant lurking down there in the low strings. In a letter to a friend, the composer wrote that the music contains “no entreaties and no complaints; only nature—cold, malevolent, and fantastic as a fairy tale.”

Make of that what you will.

Prokofiev in 1950

The concerts close with the Symphony No. 7 in C-sharp minor, op. 131 by Sergei Prokofiev. Unlike his former teacher, Prokofiev was a hard-working professional composer with a string of well-known and highly regarded works to his credit by the time he started composing the Seventh in 1951.

Alas, that meant nothing to Stalin’s Central Committee, which had started enforcing the so-called “Zhdanov Doctrine” in 1946. Named for its creator, Committee secretary Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov, the doctrine condemned what it regarded as “decadent formalism”—a vague term which, in practice, mean any type of music that did not explicitly promote the Communist Party line. Any work that seemed too abstract, too intellectual, or even vaguely dissonant was banned and its composer condemned.

Such was the fate of Prokofiev and his Symphony No. 6 Op 111, which had the misfortune to appear in the same year as the dreaded Doctrine. Although received with enthusiasm by both audiences and critics at its premiere ("another stunning victory for Soviet art," declared Pravda), only one year later the symphony’s spare and uncompromising sound provoked Zhdanov and company to declare it a failure. Suddenly those who praised it—Prokofiev’s biographer Israel Nestyev for one—suddenly decided was “clearly formalist.” “Prokofiev was stripped of his pension and left in poverty,” writes SLSO Communications Manager Caitlin Custer in her program notes “his name erased from cultural conversation."

By 1951, as a result, Prokofiev’s physical and fiscal heath were both poor. In an effort to improve both, he wrote the Symphony No. 7 in response to a commission from the Children’s Division of State Radio. He hoped its apparent simplicity and charm would earn him the 100,000 ruble Stalin Prize, and at the behest of conductor Samuil Samosud, even went so far as to re-write the original wistful and enigmatic ending to make it more upbeat.

It was all for naught. The symphony didn’t win the prize and the competing endings have led subsequent conductors with the dilemma of which one to use. Custer says Søndergård will be using the “happy” ending, but others have opted for the composer’s original. That includes Seiji Ozawa, whose 2000 recording with the Berlin Philharmonic is the one you can hear in the SLSO’s Spotify playlist.

Kirill Karabits, who recorded a complete Prokofiev symphony cycle with the Bournemouth Symphony in 2014, agrees. “You could call it a farewell symphony,” he said in a 2016 interview for The Gramophone. “It’s a symphony that looks back over his life and childhood—an old man’s dream of childhood. But he’s also saying farewell. Look at the ending—it’s just a heartbeat that slows down and then stops.” The Karabits recording includes the upbeat ending as a separate track and I have to say it does sound rather like the last-minute addition that it was.

Tchaikovsky circa 1872

The Seventh Symphony was, in any case, a true “farewell symphony” in that it was Prokofiev’s last completed work. He died less than a year after its 1952 premiere on, ironically, the same day as Stalin.

In between Liadov and Prokofiev we get the Tchaikovsky concerto, an enduring chestnut that always gets a warm response. The lively melodies (some appropriated from Ukrainian folk sources) and flashy piano part never fail to appeal. The challenge, for Hough, will be to find an approach to it that can make an old standard like this one fresh and exciting. Given his wide range of interests—he’s a writer and composer as well as a spectacular pianist—he’s just the man to do it.

The Essentials: Thomas Søndergård makes his SLSO debut conducting the orchestra and pianist Stephen Hough in an all-Russian concert of Liadov’s “The Enchanted Lake,” Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, and Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 7. Performances are Friday at 10:30 am and Saturday at 8 pm, October 28 and 29. The Saturday concert will be broadcast live, as usual, on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3.