Notes for: July 25, 2017
Glière was a 20th-century composer with 19th-century musical instincts. Gifted and prolific, over a long career that began in Czarist Russia and ended during Stalin’s Soviet regime he never strayed from his Russian Romantic nationalist roots. While his onetime composition student Prokofiev fled to the West to escape the Russian Revolution, Glière stayed and remained relatively unscathed by the upheavals that shook the country and traumatized so many of its artists. For many years he was an esteemed professor of composition, first at the Kiev Conservatory and then at the Moscow Conservatory, where he influenced a generation of Russian composers.
Glière wrote more than 500 works, many of them on a grand scale. His epic Third Symphony, which charts the exploits of a legendary Russian hero, was a huge success. So were his operas and ballets, especially the 1927 ballet The Red Poppy, which was hailed as a model of Soviet Socialist Realism (it included “Dance of the Russian Sailors,” the Glière piece that Westerners are probably most familiar with). Glière wrote everything from overtures to commemorate Soviet anniversaries to a cello concerto for Mstislav Rostropovich. It helped that he was apolitical, that his music never veered from tonality, and that he sought out and incorporated into his compositions the folk melodies of the far-flung republics of the USSR. He was heaped with honors: the Order of Lenin, People’s Artist of the USSR, and the Stalin Prize were among his many awards.
While much of what Glière wrote was big and stirring, he showed a more intimate side in his songs, piano pieces, and especially works for small combinations of strings – he had been a violin prodigy and enjoyed writing for strings in particular. As might be expected from a composer who also was an influential teacher, Glière was a skilled craftsman, and his compositions show a winning inventiveness. You can hear his adroitness in this charming set of colorfully drawn pieces, which Glière originally wrote as Duos for Violin and Cello. The American bassist and composer Frank Proto transcribed several of the pieces for violin and double bass; we’re hearing three of them tonight.
The titles suggest a Baroque suite of dances; and as in a Baroque suite, each of these compact pieces has its own strong character and style. The dark, unsettling opening Prelude, with its heart-tugging emotion, is bathed in Romantic sentiment. Tchaikovsky would have appreciated the Intermezzo, an elegant waltz with lovely long melodic lines. From Romantic to Baroque, the light-hearted Gavotte looks back to Bach, except that its middle section is more folk than Baroque. With their combination of Romantic gestures, suggestions of Russian folk melody, and Baroque formality, these atmospheric duos ingratiate.