The published article is available on this link<\/a>. The critic is Steven Kruger.<\/p>\n\n\n\nReinhold Gli\u00e8re was fortunate to thrive under Soviet Communism. A long-limbed bardic style, featuring haunting melodies evoking the Russian ecclesiastical past, ruffled no political feathers. Nor did velvety explorations of Scriabin-influenced chromaticism. He was never purged. But Gli\u00e8re paid a price for fame in the world of democracy and commerce, it would seem. His greatest work, the 1912 Mahler-length Symphony No. 3, \u201cIl\u2019ya Muromets\u201d, was deemed \u201ctoo long\u201d for the concert hall in America. To ensure its presentation, Leopold Stokowski persuaded the composer to pare it down drastically, and it was in this incomplete condition that the work took root in Philadelphia and in American ears.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s possible that Stokowski reduced the score even further as the years passed. By the time he recorded the symphony in stereo with the Houston Symphony in the late 1960s, a performance still available, \u201cIl\u2019ya Muromets\u201d was down to 38 minutes. In its natural state, with a pedantic conductor like Harold Farberman, the piece comes in at 93 minutes! As someone who frequently experienced Stokowski live and noticed how much he cared for chromaticism, I have to laugh when I consider that Stokowski\u2019s Houston recording of the slow movement features all the Scriabinesque windswept string filigree Gli\u00e8re wrote at the beginning and at the end, but leaves out entirely the main meat and melody of the movement! I would argue as well, that only the scherzo escaped Stokowski\u2019s way with a medieval sword. The outer movements are hopelessly unbalanced. Arms and legs have been hacked off. Meanwhile John Cleese of the Pythons, it would seem, is telling us it\u2019s \u201cjust a flesh wound\u201d!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Eugene Ormandy, fortunately, took up the Philadelphia Gli\u00e8re tradition, too, and recorded \u201cIl\u2019ya Muromets\u201d twice. I know the later RCA LP well, with good sound from 1972 and still available from ArkivMusic as a CD-R. In Ormandy\u2019s reduction, the work comes in at just under an hour and at least makes sense. Ormandy\u2019s lush strings and splendiferous brass sound quite Russian, and Ormandy\u2019s swift but supple tempos create real excitement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the digital era, I am happy to say that we now have three quite wonderful versions of the full work. Edward Downes and the BBC Philharmonic create the lushest sound world\u2013but not much edge\u2013for Chandos. JoAnn Falletta and the Buffalo Philharmonic, for Naxos, are intense and swift, like Ormandy, but a touch rigid and tight. George Szell is lurking in there somewhere, but Falletta\u2019s performance is definitely exciting. And you get from her performance the sense that the work makes for good structural logic in the concert hall. Lastly, and I would say best,<\/em> we have this remarkably authentic-sounding new performance from Gabriel Feltz and the Belgrade Philharmonic, evocatively and powerfully recorded by Dreyer Gaido.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gli\u00e8re\u2019s music sprawls for the same reason Bruckner and Shostakovich symphonies do. Gli\u00e8re is an annunciatory composer. This means great tremolo-supported brass declarations followed by silences, and that\u2019s where conductors like Farberman can get stuck going too slowly, carried away with the import of each proclamation. Gabriel Feltz is assisted by the authentic Eastern European sound of his brass section. It\u2019s heavy and rich and yet slightly blunt and raw and funereal. Feltz manages to summon almost unbelievable weight. His fast tempos are nearly as swift as Falletta\u2019s, but Feltz\u2019s evocation of the sense of legend is somehow deeper and truer. This is memorable music, unforgettably good music, emotional with not a hint of neurosis. It emerges from gloom and doom, celebrates joyously like Borodin along the way, and then devolves to despair and mystery once again. Though the symphony sports a heroic title, it would seem the hero has a hard time. The legend of Il\u2019ya Muromets would give one nightmares. It\u2019s one of those lovely pre-Freudian tales involving decapitation, eye-stabbing, defeat by the enemy and the turning of the hero to stone. It\u2019s not exactly the Legend of Sleepy Hollow<\/em>. But then, well, it\u2019s Russia and the Balkans, no happier in 1912 than now, it would seem. Fortunately, in Gli\u00e8re\u2019s hands, inspiration does not stop, and this candidate for \u201cworld\u2019s longest symphony\u201d, as conducted by Gabriel Feltz, almost ends too soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The prestigious international art magazine New York Arts has published a review on the occasion of a CD of the monumental symphony „Ilya Muromets“ by Reinhold Gli\u00e8re, recorded by the Belgrade Philharmonic and Chief Conductor Gabriel Feltz. This first CD by the Belgrade Philharmonic and its chief conductor was recorded for the German publishing house […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24809,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-en"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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