Musorgsky. Sviridov

Musorgsky wrote the triumphal march The Capture of Kars in 1880. The work commemorates the events of the last Russo-Turkish war when the Russian Army took the Turkish citadel of Kars on 9 October 1877. This victory essentially heralded the end of military action in the Caucasus.
The military march is one of the composer’s lesser-known works. After Musorgsky’s death, The Capture of Kars was edited by Rimsky-Korsakov and later – in the Soviet period – by Pavel Alexandrovich Lamm when preparing a complete volume of the composer’s works. Yevgeny Svetlanov’s recording of the triumphal march is the only evidence of this piece having been performed for several decades.

Musorgsky wrote his Intermezzo for full symphony orchestra in 1867 as a present for Borodin. The work is based on his 1861 piece for piano, which Musorgsky reworked and orchestrated. The Intermezzo survives to the present day in Rimsky-Korsakov’s version, created after the composer’s death. The only recording in existence is by Svetlanov.

Modest Petrovich Musorgsky’s vocal cycle Songs and Dances of Death| (1875–1877) is one of the most unusual incarnations of a subject familiar to world culture since the Middle Ages. Franz Liszt’s acclaimed Danse macabre, too, exerted an influence on the idea for the work, which had come initially from Vladimir Vasilievich Stasov, the composer’s friend and an art critic. Together with the poet Arseny Arkadyevich Golenishchev-Kutuzov, Musorgsky created an original composition from four independent sections unified by a common image. In the Lullaby there is Death the Comforter; but already by the end of the next number, Serenade, the mask of suffering has been torn away and Death’s victorious cry (“You are mine!”) reveals its true face. In the finale, the image of death is placed on a truly universal scale. The composer changed the title The Triumph of Death given by Golenishchev-Kutuzov to The Field-Marshal, creating a musical image of Death on a triumphant, terrifying march. Under the impression of the first performance of The Field-Marshal, Musorgsky wrote to the poet: “Some kind of riveting love, some kind of elusive, deathly love can be heard! It is… death, coldly and passionately in love with death, enjoying death.”
In 1962, Dmitry Dmitrievich Shostakovich created an orchestral version of Songs and Dances of Death with which he was delighted, entitling it “a work of arch-genius”. He dedicated it to Galina Pavlovna Vishnevskaya, the first performer of the orchestral version of the cycle (the premiere took place on 12 November 1962 in Gorki, conducted by Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich).
Vladimir Goryachikh

The Miniature Triptych is one of Georgy Sviridov’s late instrumental works. It comprises three movements. These movements may be compared to a “folding door”. It opens up and before you that you have a map of Russia.
Here the picturesque quality is not a metaphor. The three movements of the work, which may be compared with a symphony, are three tableaux, although they have no programme titles in themselves. The association in this work lies in and utterly depends upon how rich the listener’s imagination is. Here there is song, there are images of Russian culture, there is bell-ringing and there are scenes of national epos. The evenness and lack of conflict, the measured quality and repetitiveness, the possibility of postponing the end and of prolonging time – all of these are ghosts, like a Russian epos, and the Triptych aims to convey them through music.

Musical Illustrations to Pushkin’s Story “The Snow Storm” is based on Georgy Sviridov’s music for the film The Snow Storm, released in 1964. The work is a suite consisting of nine pieces, a kind of “instrumental songs” that conjure up picturesque scenes one after another. The Illustrations are one of Sviridov’s few symphonic works. The absence of words and voices required a new approach to the orchestra, which is presented her in as great as possible a similarity to vocal and choral sound. The music of The Snow Storm brilliantly matches the spirit of Pushkin’s novel, its simplicity and lack of artifice, the simplicity of its protagonists and their entire approach to life.