MUSIC: Gone but not Quite Forgotten
More music from Moscow
Concert for the Centenary of Aram Khachaturian — Moscow Conservatoire, 25th April 2003 (Moscow Academic Symphony Orchestra);
Honegger and Tchaikovsky — Moscow conservatoire, 22nd April 2003 (Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra)
The Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian (1903-1978) has not sunk entirely from view since his death, solely due to two short extracts from his oeuvre, the ‘Sabre Dance’ from the ballet Gayaneh and the soupy tune from his other major ballet, Spartacus, which was used as the them tune for the TV series The Onedin Line. These snippets can still be heard from time to time on Classic FM, although it is significant that other parts of the works from which they are lifted get an airing rarely if at all. So it seemed worth attending the concert given for the centenary of the composer’s birth at the Moscow Conservatoire, which, apart from a suite drawn from Gayaneh included his massive Second Symphony of 1943 and his once slightly popular Piano Concerto (1936).
Khachaturian was a double outsider in his career as a Soviet composer. First, he was an Armenian born in Georgia. Secondly, he was no musical prodigy — in fact he came to music very late as a profession, coming up to Moscow to study biology in 1921, and not completing his musical studies, (in which his teachers included Gliere and Miaskovsky) until 1936. By this time of course the careers of his two principal Russian composing contemporaries, Prokofiev and Shostakovich, were well under way. One has the feeling that a sense of inferiority may have dogged him throughout his career — amongst the photos in a little exhibition accompanying the concert was a fascinating one of Khachaturian sitting at the keyboard looking extremely nervous, as well he might have done as the picture also shows, looking over his shoulder, the talentless and manipulative Tikhon Krennikov, the apparatchik who bossed the Soviet Composers Union and decided who was in or out of favour from 1948 to 1962.
However I fear the concert revealed that Khachaturian had much to feel inferior about. His Second Symphony must rank as one of the most wasted hours I have ever spent. Dedicated to the Soviet Heroes of the Great Patriotic War, it was I suppose the composer’s attempt to rise to the acclaim of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony of 1941. Although the latter has many faults, it is at least generally coherent. Khachaturian alas proves in this work that he is incapable of generating any ideas that can bear the weight of a symphonic development. The result is a series of disjointed episodes in which the few knacks and gestures of which the composer is capable are repeated to the point of agony.
Khachaturian’s style displays two clear trade-marks. One is extremely loud passages, supported by a battery of percussion and especially the xylophone. The other is wibbly passages on the strings which are there to suggest his Caucasian background. His music also demonstrates a good knowledge of the rhetoric of his nineteenth-century predecessors, especially Tchaikovsky as regards orchestration and sententious orchestral recitative, and Borodin as regards oriental sentimentalism.
And that’s about it. This is just composing by numbers. The Second Symphony looks like, and has the length of, a serious orchestral work, but it is to music what cardboard is to cuisine. Khachaturian even resorts to padding out the slow movement by quoting the Dies Irae theme, a sure sign of desperation. The Piano Concerto, being shorter, was not so unbearable, and the Gayaneh suite acceptable only when it cribbed from the ‘Polovtsian Dances’ of Prince Igor. The performances, under the baton of Pavel Kogan, were accurate as far as I could discern; I would say ‘committed’, but how can one be committed to music without any trace of genuine emotion, idea or content? Thank heavens, in retrospect, that we were not offered Khachaturian's Third Symphony which even the enthusiast David Fanning describes as an ‘amazingly crude spectacle’ of ‘stentorian stupefaction . . . with its 15 obbligato trumpets and organ’.
We cannot regret,then, the eclipse of Khachaturian, although I must warn readers that the numerous symphonies of the contemporary Georgian composer Gya Kancheli, which have some modish support, are just as rebarbative for similar reasons. Avoid.
Three days previously however we were reminded of a genuine talent, Arthur Honegger, who has also slipped from the repertoire, but with far less justification. Once, with Poulenc, a member of the French group 'Les Six' (and I bet no-none out there can name the other four), he is now remembered only perhaps for his wonderful sound-picture of a steam locomotive, 'Pacific 231', although I recall hearing his rather weird oratorio 'Joan of Arc at the Stake' in Hungarian a few years ago (I was in Budapest at the time with Mrs. Buchler interpreting for me).
The Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra under Misha Damev gave us a fine performance of Honegger's Second Symphony of 1941, which is for strings, with obbligato solo trumpet in its coda. This is a piece of real symphonic integrity, with neat neo-classical structure and driving rhythms, let down just a little by a rather constipated slow movement, with a dirge-like cantilena over grinding harmonies. Even more enjoyable was the Concertino, which is, as you would expect from a piece composed in Paris in 1924, full of jazz inflections and 'blue notes'. The second movement, in which various orchestral intruments wheeze and stutter against a quaint melodic line on the piano, summoned to your critic an irresistable and memorable picture of ancient fogies at play in a meadow of wild flowers. Some smart promoter should present this music as an alternative to Prokofiev's similarly concise First Piano Concerto where a filler of this sort is needed.
The excellent soloist was Sergei Kuznetsov, who appeared to be (and perhaps was, for all I know) a gawky youth of eighteen, but played wittily and with spirit; and for an encore gave finely judged performances of Schumann's 'Traumerei' and 'Traumes Wirren'. I don't know if this young man has come to London yet, but look out for him if he does.
Allen Buchler, April 27, 2003 11:25 AM