Various Composers - Ukrainian Piano Quintets (Various Artists)

Information

• (01) Boris Lyatoshynsky - Ukrainian Quintet, Op. 42
• (05) Valentin Silvestrov - Piano Quintet (to Boris Lyatoshynsky)
• (08) Victoria Poleva - Simurgh-Quintet

Bogdana Pivnenko & Taras Yaropud, violins

Kateryna Suprun, viola

Yurii Pogoretskyi, cello

Iryna Starodub, piano

Date: 2021

Label: Naxos

https://www.naxos.com/catalogue/item.asp?item_code=8.579098

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Review

Finally I’ve found my CD equivalent to Proust’s memory-laden madeleine. Not only are the performers former classmates and colleagues of mine at the Kyiv Academy of Music, but I ended up studying with the niece of Boris Lyatoshynsky, most of my lessons taking place at the late composer’s house and on his piano. If you think the second movement of his 1942 Quintet is stark, you should see the interior of his museum-like residence, complete with a large, ornate clock that had not been wound since the hour and minute of his death.

Compared to Lyatoshynsky’s post-Scriabinian 1920s symphonies, his wartime Piano Quintet is decidedly backwards-looking, its language firmly rooted in the late Romantic tradition, and more than once tipping its hat to Rachmaninov. The outlandishly heroic and defiant tone of the piece, compounded by cyclic returns and the presence of Ukrainian folk tunes and idioms (most overtly in the middle section of the stormy third movement) doubtless played a part in its official approval and endorsement, resulting in a Stalin Prize (albeit second class). Quite distinct from the piano quintets of Shostakovich and Weinberg that bookend it historically, Lyatoshynsky’s work is suffused with Ukrainian national pride and identity. Pivnenko and her colleagues are intense and full-blooded throughout, technically masterly though less than ideally refined or varied in colour. The piano sound is rather unvarying and unvarnished – maybe effective for a live concert performance but not so much for a recording.

Dedicated to Lyatoshynsky, his teacher, Valentin Silvestrov’s 1961 Quintet reveals the 24-year-old composer at an experimental and exploratory stage. Silvestrov has credited Lyatoshynsky’s comment, ‘Do you like this?’, on one of his experimental works of the early 1960s (could it have been the Quintet?) as crucial to his eventual turn to his now familiar spiritual ‘metamusic’ style. Indeed, despite being predominantly angular and atonal, with some highly rhetorical Soviet-sounding elements, the Quintet does occasionally prophesy Silvestrov’s later language through its floating islands of otherworldly episodes.

A generation on from Silvestrov, Victoria Vita Poleva has followed him in abandoning a post-avant-garde idiom for spiritual minimalism, as in her 17-minute Quintet, which is strongly indebted to his style. Simurgh is the almighty, all-knowing bird of Persian mythology. The fuller story, not divulged in the booklet, is crucial to an understanding of the piece. Poleva has chosen the Sufi interpretation of Simurgh as in the 12th-century poem ‘Conference of the Birds’. Advised to seek the Simurgh as their sovereign, the birds cross seven valleys of hardship and misery, only to realise that the searcher and the searched for are the same. With only 30 (si in Persian) birds (murgh), they themselves become the Si murgh. The concept is rather more interesting than Poleva’s work, which is organised around a dialogue between quiet string chorales and the piano’s glacial repeated notes and tremolos, until the dramatic emergence of the mighty bird in the piano leading to the final unification. Pivnenko and her team make as strong a case possible for the piece, showing great sensitivity, yet also enough dynamic range to create a sense of momentum towards the ending. The recording is billed as a world premiere of the revised version but the booklet gives no indication as to the nature of the revisions.

Curiously, Naxos has given us a mixture of Ukrainian and Russian spellings for the artists’ and composers’ names. But that’s a small quibble, given the pioneering nature of a disc that will hopefully encourage more exploration of this repertoire.

-- Michelle Assay, Gramophone

More reviews:
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2022/Feb/Ukrainian-quintets-8579098.htm

http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2022/Mar/Ukrainian-quintets-8579098.htm

https://www.allmusic.com/album/ukrainian-piano-quintets-lyatoshynsky-poleva-silvestrov-mw0003609449

https://www.wtju.net/ukrainian-piano-quintets-exceptional/

https://www.naxos.com/reviews/reviewslist.asp?catalogueid=8.579098&languageid=EN

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Boris Lyatoshinsky, or Lyatoshynsky (January 3, 1895 – April 15, 1968) was a Ukrainian composer, conductor, and teacher. He was a student of Reinhold Glière and a leading member of the new generation of twentieth-century Ukrainian composers. He wrote a variety of works, including five symphonies, symphonic poems, and several shorter orchestral and vocal works, two operas, chamber music, and a number of works for solo piano. His early compositions were greatly influenced by Scriabin and Rachmaninov, while his later musical style developed in a direction similar to Shostakovich.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Lyatoshinsky

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Valentyn Sylvestrov (born 30 September 1937 in Kiev) is a Ukrainian composer and pianist of contemporary classical music. He studied composition under Borys Lyatoshynsky, harmony and counterpoint under Levko Revutsky. Sylvestrov is perhaps best known for his post-modern musical style. His principal and published works include nine symphonies, poems for piano and orchestra, three string quartets, a piano quintet, three piano sonatas, piano pieces, chamber music, and vocal music. Sylvestrov's Symphony No. 5 (1980–1982) is considered by some to be his masterpiece.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentyn_Sylvestrov

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Victoria Polevá (born September 11, 1962 in Kiev) is a Ukrainian composer. She studied at the Kiev Conservatory with Ivan Karabyts and Levko Kolodub, and taught there from 1990 to 2005. Since 2005 she has been a freelance composer; her compositions includes symphonic, choral and chamber music. Polevá's early works were related to the aesthetics of the avant-garde and polystylistics, and from the late 1990s her music became identified stylistically with "sacred minimalism". Her works are perfomed by such artists as Gidon Kremer, Aleksei Ogrintchouk and Roman Kofman.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Poleva

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