Myaskosky - Symphony No.7 (Leo Ginsburg) / Knipper - Symphonietta, Concert Poem (Mikhail Terian) - 1988

While still engaged on the vast canvas of the Sixth Symphony, commenced in 1919 but not completed until 1923, Myaskovsky began work on his Seventh Symphony which he nished in 1922. In many respects the symphonies are interwoven and represent very different fruits stemming from the same creative act. The Sixth is Myaskovsky’s expression of his attitude to the 1917 revolution. Some critics have hailed it as the rst socialist realist symphony with its celebration of popular French revolutionary airs like Ca Ira and the Carmagnole, culminating in an optimistic apotheosis - a formula later to be adopted frequently by many of Myaskovsky’s own pupils. Others have regarded the Sixth as the end of a musical era, the swan song of the great romantic musical tradition, whose peak was represented by Tchaikovsky’s own Sixth Symphony and have tended to ignore the revolutionary references, highlighting the traditional aspects of the music of the rst three movements. Myaskovsky himself wrote about the external inuences (ie.non-Russian) that gave rise to the symphony, referring to an artist, whose name is not given, whom he met at the house of his friends, the Derzhanovskys. This artist had spent much time abroad, particularly in France, where he had learned many songs of workers and artisans. “This man made a deep
impression on me and I made up my mind to write a symphony expressing in some ways the feelings that he aroused in me." The symphony also contained many other images: the theme of Verhaeren’s “Les Aubes" about the death of a revolutionary hero and the honours paid to him by the people, also the howling winter winds of Petrograd evoked in the Scherzo. Above all, however, the symphony is about life and death — an expression of the ambivalence felt by Myaskovsky‘s generation towards the realities of the Revolution, an event which while it was welcomed was not fully understood. It is an indication of Myaskovsky's own hesitation in seeking to express his own feelings to his full satisfaction that he found it necessary to lay aside the Sixth and embark upon the composition of the Seventh Symphony. In the Seventh, Myaskovsky returns to the more introspective and relaxed world of the Third and Fifth Symphonies, in which a personal, intimate range of ideas are given expression, combining muted echoes of the stormy world of the Sixth with more tranquil images like the musette or cradle song. Indeed, throughout the vast output of Myaskovsky’s twenty-seven symphonies, the composer’s art returns again and again to these echoes or residual upsurges of inspiration, derived from previous compositions but becoming manifested in very different forms. A one-movement work, the Seventh Symphony begins darkly but powerful emotions soon assert themselves with vibrant passion, in a theme that is started by the woodwinds. An atmosphere of muted tension is created broken orchestral snatches of an insistent character. An upwardly striving theme emerges only to be submerged in a turbulent sea of ambiguity. Darkness returns, shadows move, passions are again aroused, shafts of light are projected by the brass as the pace of the development quickens. Just when the soaring theme appears to become dominant, it weakens and plunges once more into a sea of tranquillity and introspection, having been no more than the composer’s description, “minaccioso“ (threatening). The central part of the symphony contains a beautiful, pastoral passage, in which the theme rst heard at the very beginning of the symphony is allowed to develop its innate lyricism freely and hilly, undergoing various gentle changes. The mood alters — elementsиdescribed as tenebroso herald a spiky, scherzo section which gradually builds up in intensity, marked by a jaunty but still troubled little theme that undergoes many variations, from which emerges once again the pastoral theme, this time more langorous than ever. In an atmosphere of subdued tension, the theme subsides, giving place to a nal faster passage, in which the turbulent ambiguity of the 1rst part of the symphony is given one last expression, ending abruptly.