Nikolai Myaskovsky (1881-1950)
Vocal Works Volume 2
Six Poems of Alexander Blok, Op. 20 (1920)
At the Decline of the Day: Three Sketches to the Words by Fyodor Tyutchev, Op. 21 (1922)
Three Sketches, Op. 45 (1938)
From the Lyric Poetry of Stepan Shchipachyov, Op. 52 (1940)
Songs of Many Years, Op. 87 (1901-36; rev. 1950)
Two Songs of Polar Explorers (1939)
Ilya Kuzmin (baritone)
Dzambolat Dulaev (baritone)
Olga Solovieva (piano)
rec. 2019-22 Studio One of Russian Radio House Moscow: Concert Hall of the Academy of Choral Arts, Moscow: Studio No.1 of Production Complex Tonstudio, Mosfilm, Moscow
Texts and translations included
Toccata Classics TOCC0667 [62]

The first volume in this series recreated the 1947 Moscow concert at which Myaskovsky’s last two song cycles for soprano, and his elusive Violin Sonata, were first performed. This latest release is devoted to his complete songs for baritone and once again they show the composer’s largely reserved approach to his art: deft, subtle, and seldom extrovert.

The earliest baritone songs are the Six Poems of Alexander Blok, Op. 20 (1920) in which he responds to the poetry’s nature depiction with relatively limited but still cogent responses, whether in the piano’s ‘circling’ lines in the first setting or in the relative ardour of the fifth, which by some way draws out Myaskovsky’s most tactile and dramatic responses. The motionless stars in the last setting are an index, though, of the composer’s default position in these early settings – a kind of undemonstrative introspection.

Two years later he wrote three tiny settings to words by Fyodor Tyutchev which call for a more pliant baritone and a complement of light dissonance. However, and rather characteristically, the songs are self-contained, musically and expressively, and don’t go above ‘piano’. The Three Sketches Op.45 come from 1938 and show how his response to some of the more pastorally-based texts allows his imagination to function even more pianistically than vocally – the rain-swept and windy evocations in the central song draw from him a naturalistic and descriptive quality. It might be seen to be pianistically obvious to those unsympathetic but to me his response to the texts is admirably honest, direct and even, occasionally, allusive.

The sense of refinement in both accompaniment and in tightly constructed vocal lines is at its apex in the ten-song cycle From the Lyric Poetry of Stepan Shchipachyov, Op. 52 (1940). Though they’re as compressed as everything else in the disc, there’s a more vivid response to text and texture here. Accompaniment moves from impressionist-hinting ripple to evocation of rainfall to stoic dignity – compressed, succinct, unflashy in the best Myaskovsky tradition – in deft support of the vocal line. In one of the songs he even goes so far as to introduce a narrative theme familiar from heroic Soviet Realism but it’s lightly done, as almost always with him.

The cycle Songs of Many Years was composed over more than three decades and includes his first known song, one of ardour and freedom though one that enshrines a familiar trope, that of a circling piano accompaniment. In another he embraces modality. Finally, there are two songs to which he didn’t give an opus number, the Two Songs of Polar Explorers written in 1939 and examples of Soviet kitsch – ‘mass songs’ of which the second is very much the more brazen and overt. These are very rare examples in Myaskovsky’s oeuvre and, as Professor Patrick Zuk writes in his extensive and excellent booklet notes, this is clearly indicative of a lack of enthusiasm for them. Myaskovsky told his colleague Maximilian Steinberg that ‘I cannot write “happy music” and have absolutely no feeling for it’. That’s something borne out in his songs though that’s not to say that an avoidance of levity and the joyous is a bad thing.

There are two baritones in this disc. Dzambolat Dulaev has the more pliant voice, but Ilya Kuzmin is given the best music. Both acquit themselves well. As in the earlier volume Olga Solovieva is the imaginative pianist. There are full texts and translations and a clear Moscow recording. Best of all, this series is opening up a little-known area of the composer’s writing and these are all first recordings.

Jonathan Woolf

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Previous review: Gregor Tassie (July 2023)