Suite from the film music for "The Late Frost in Spring"(1955)
Symphony No. 8 (1956)
Lacplessis, symphonic poem (1957)

Suite from the film music for "The Late Frost in Spring":
Latvian National Symphony Orchestra
Imants Resnis (conductor)
Recording: 1987
Symphony No. 8:
Latvian National Symphony Orchestra
Edgars Tons (conductor)
Recording: 1961
Lacplessis, symphonic poem:
Latvian National Symphony Orchestra
Vassily Sinaisky (conductor)
Recording: 1978

Campion CAMEO 2012

The 1955 film The Late Frost in Spring was an adaptation of a novel on a rustic drama. The novel was by one of Ivanovs' favourite authors, Rudolfs Blaumanis (1863-1908). The music commissioned was to be in short sections the longest of which is 5.40 (Matisins). The notes tell us that the themes are drawn from Ivanovs 'lost' Second Symphony. It was lost when the film was first released. When the Symphony resurfaced 1985 Latvian audiences attending the concert revival found themselves already familiar with the symphony's themes from the film music. The music is pastoral tragic (listen to the chaste and lonely flute at 5.01 in track 7), highly romantic, slightly cool (as befits the title) having parallels with Rota's Romeo and Juliet as well as Prokofiev's ballet, on the one hand and Richard Rodney Bennett's Far From the Madding Crowd on the other. The great yearning theme has something in common with the Finn, Levi Madetoja's Second Symphony. The suite is in nine movements though the booklet claims ten. This is instantly attractive music. Classic fm (and similar stations) really should give this some air-time. It is only inertia that keeps them from playing this atmospheric music.

The Eighth Symphony, alternates two 11 minute andantes with two much briefer (3.30 and 6.30) allegros. Its big Andante Allegro first movement has some of the lolling tunefulness of the Violin Concerto but the dark skies are already beginning to crowd in heavy with pessimism (4.14). The first Allegro flies hither and yon like the warring Montagues and Capulets. The angry energy of the balletic Prokofiev is never far away in this music; the final allegro likewise. Here however the energy is much more light-hearted - almost celebratory (at times rather like the faster sections of Moeran's neo-classical Serenade but with more emotional 'juice') and fury is held at bay.

Lacplesis is a tone poem written at the same time as the Eighth Symphony well after the heyday of the genre. It is based on a folk legend in which Lacplesis is the freedom fighter. Other characters in the tale are each allocated a theme and the themes interact and develop. The music is great-hearted and wide-spanning, still romantic and with much in common with the Piano Concerto (vol. 7). The notes quote the commentary of musicologist Vizbulite Berzin who remarks, no doubt from the perspective of devout Soviet exegesis, that in this work mere landscape pictorialism was left behind and in its place the heroic struggle for freedom takes the stage. Certainly the work radiates that feeling but without resorting to gaudy street-poster emotions.

A further instalment of Ivanovs' powerfully austere lyricism. Your handle on Twentieth Century symphonism will be incomplete without this series.

Sound quality: variable but no serious obstacle to communication. Notes: thorough (allowing for typos)and bilingual (English/German).

Rob Barnett, MusicWeb, April 2002