Classics, Romanticism, Avant-garde — Bolshoi theatre wind quintet

The Bolshoi Wind Quintet proudly presents its CD Classics, Romanticism, Avant-garde. Recorded in spring 2014 in Beethoven Hall at the Bolshoi Theatre. Sound engineer: Nadezhda Nikolayeva.

The Bolshoi Theatre embraces everything: opera, ballet, symphonic, choral and vocal concerts. Such breadth is natural for a leading opera house. Its musicians can perform music from the distant past to the present, from vast theatrical canvases to intimate chamber scores. A well-coordinated orchestra consists of individuals who know how to listen to one another, a skill developed in chamber ensembles where every player is a soloist. Musicians reveal themselves most fully when they can work both in a large orchestra and in smaller groups. The wind quintet is one such ensemble.

The classical woodwind quintet took shape in European music in the early nineteenth century. Its name survives even though only three of its instruments — oboe, clarinet and bassoon — are made of wood. The modern flute is metal, while the horn belongs to the brass family. Each instrument has an unmistakable timbre, yet their combination offers a rich spectrum and allows composers to write music as fully satisfying as that for string quartet or piano trio.

In the mid-twentieth century the Bolshoi Wind Quintet was a well-known Moscow chamber ensemble, bringing together the orchestra’s finest players. It performed at the theatre and toured independently. Its musicians also belonged to Alexander Lazarev’s celebrated Bolshoi Soloists Ensemble, which introduced Soviet audiences to rare repertoire and left an extensive discography. The quintet ceased performing in the 1990s. Today it has been recreated on the initiative of the wind players themselves, with the enthusiastic support of the theatre’s management. Its Beethoven Hall programmes explore European, American and Russian music, including many arrangements. For its first album the quintet chose Russian music.

There are relatively few Russian works for wind quintet, but they represent remarkably different eras and styles. The musicians could have assembled a programme of arrangements. Instead, they chose only original works, composing the missing pieces themselves. The result spans three centuries of Russian music: Romanticism, traditionalism, the avant-garde and contemporary eccentricity.

Alexander Alyabyev: Quintet for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn

Alexander Alyabyev (1787–1851), sometimes called the Russian Schubert, wrote popular operas and vaudevilles and the world-famous song The Nightingale. A brave veteran of the War of 1812, a boisterous hussar and card player, he was exiled to Siberia in middle age for a murder that was never conclusively proved.

His single-movement wind quintet, one of his few chamber works, is far from a naive amateur effort. Alyabyev studied seriously with the contrapuntist Miller in his youth, and the quintet shows considerable command of polyphony and thematic development. It is in sonata form. The introduction and epilogue display his characteristic melancholy, elegiac manner; the first theme has the vigour of Classicism, while the second recalls Italian opera.

Sergei Lysenko: Fantasy on Themes from Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades

Sergei Lysenko is a soloist of the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra. Although his Fantasy uses Tchaikovsky’s themes, one immediately hears a contemporary composer familiar with jazz.

The Fantasy opens with the funeral service for the tragically deceased Hermann, then rewinds the story like a cinematic flashback. Lysenko insists that Hermann himself is the narrator. Like Batman, he leaps from the Summer Garden to the Countess’s bedroom, listens closely to Tomsky’s story, wrestles with the mystery of the three cards, encounters the Countess’s ghost and repeats her song. The work ends with Hermann defying fate amid thunder and storm. Drawing on the quintet’s virtuosity, Lysenko set himself the difficult task of conveying the brilliance of Tchaikovsky’s orchestra with just five instruments — and succeeded.

Edison Denisov: Quintet (1969)
I. Lento, poco rubato
II. Allegro giusto

Edison Denisov (1929–1996) was a guiding figure of the Soviet avant-garde. Defying official aesthetics, he introduced the principles of new music into Soviet musical life, trained a school of composers and became the first president of the revived Association for Contemporary Music. He also wrote the touching theme for the film The Nameless Star.

To today’s ears his Quintet sounds almost academic, with few unconventional playing techniques. It has two movements, which Denisov likened to a nocturne and a scherzo. In the latter, one might add, an unpleasant little biting creature seems to scurry onto the stage. In the first movement five instruments pursue five independent contrapuntal lines, no two sharing the same rhythmic pattern. The second, by contrast, demands strict synchronisation. A variant of rondo form, it alternates sharp staccatissimo chords — which the composer compared to piercing paper — with “sounding silences”. It is a test of ensemble coordination, and a conductor was indispensable. Konstantin Shimarev directs the Bolshoi Wind Quintet in this recording.

Yevgeny Svetlanov: A Day in the Country
Morning · Noon · Evening · Midnight

Yevgeny Svetlanov (1928–2002), the great conductor and long-serving head of the USSR State Symphony Orchestra, left a monumental recorded anthology of Russian music. He was also a pianist and composer, best known in that capacity for the music to Vasily Shukshin’s film The Red Snowball Tree. He instructed that no speeches should be made at his funeral: only recordings of his own music were to be played.

A Day in the Country was written for the State Symphony Orchestra’s soloists and recorded by them. It presents an idyllic view of the world, rare in twentieth-century art. In Morning, the composer seems not yet to have risen from bed, contemplating the sky in a somewhat French-Impressionist spirit, lingering over a single harmony and using just six notes. Noon celebrates leisure, with villagers dancing decorously. Evening introduces unease: a fairground celebration has gone on too long, the merriment taking a troubling turn. Consciously or not, Svetlanov admits a criminal element through an intonation from the smugglers’ chorus at the beginning of Act Three of Bizet’s Carmen. Midnight restores the idyll, in the finest Russian tradition.

Nikolai Popov: Carnival of Animals and Insects
The Singing Elephant · The Furry Bumblebee · The Dancing Penguin · The Lovesick Goose · The Tortoise

Bolshoi soloist Nikolai Popov takes up the idea of Saint-Saëns’s famous Carnival of the Animals. Each miniature is a musical caricature of a member of the quintet and his instrument: the Singing Elephant is Alexei Raev and his horn; the Dancing Penguin is Sergei Petrov’s clarinet; the Furry Bumblebee is Sergei Lysenko’s oboe; the Lovesick Goose is Andrei Rudometkin’s bassoon. The Tortoise is a self-portrait with flute.

Popov’s enthusiasm for jazz helped shape the cycle: each piece uses jazz rhythms or harmonies. At heart, however, this Bolshoi musician remains a classical composer. There is no improvisation: every note is carefully written out and checked repeatedly in friendly rehearsals.

Booklet notes by composer and musicologist Pyotr Pospelov.

The Bolshoi Wind Quintet thanks the people and companies without whom this recording would not have been possible: Bolshoi Theatre General Director Vladimir Urin; Music Director and Chief Conductor Tugan Sokhiev; orchestra manager Alexander Shanin; the Bolshoi video studio and Nikita Tikhonov; Italmatik and Natalia Sokolova; Global Education Facilitators, Inc. and Yakov Ryzhak; Konstantin Shimarev, Elena Travnikova and Alexander Shalin.

Media support: ClassicalMusicNews.Ru. Official website development and support: Boris Lifanovsky.