Piano Concerto:
Latvian National Symphony Orchestra
Vassili Sinaisky (conductor)
Igor Zhukov (piano)
Recording: 1977
Andante:
Latvian National Symphony Orchestra
Tovijs Lifsics (conductor)
Recording: 1982
Symphony No. 10:
Latvian National Symphony Orchestra
Edgars Tons (conductor)
Recording: 1963
Campion CAMEO 2013
Campion must surely rate an industry award for their dogged pursuit of the Ivanovs radio tapes from Latvian Radio. With each disc issued there will have been a complex of copyright issues to surmount. Each issue is achieved against the tide. The company have already issued volumes 1-3. Contractual issues have caused them (for now) to skip over instalments 4 and 5 and move directly to volumes 6 and 7.
Ivanovs is a Latvian late-romantic with an idiom that developed closer to mid-period Prokofiev with subtle elements of 19th century Nordic romance (Sibelius and Atterberg) and also of modernity (Honegger and Shostakovich).
There can be little doubt that Janis Ivanovs' ambition was as a symphonist. After all he wrote twenty-one of them from the 1930s through to the 1970s. The symphonic creative urge remained vital throughout his mature life. His productivity was much more evenly spread that that of a Havergal Brian a composer with whom, at least quantitatively, he can be compared. The majority of Brian's thirty-two symphonies belong to his seventies, eighties and nineties. Brian held a place of honour in Malcolm Macdonald's seminal book on 'musical mavericks', "Opus Est" (Kahn and Averill, 1978). Ivanovs could so easily have been found alongside Mr Macdonald's pantheon which included Pettersson, Brian, Vermeulen and Sorabji.
The half hour long Piano Concerto is tougher, less overtly proletarian than Ivanovs' wonderfully lyrical Violin Concerto. It has a hieratic or incantatory tone - touched with the monumentalism of Bax's Symphonic Variations, the splintery oratory of Ireland's Piano Concerto and the asperity of Prokofiev as in the up-rushing introduction of the Prokofiev First Piano Concerto. At the start of the andante moderato (II) the influence is early Rachmaninov and Scriabin (the piano concerto). Zhukov, a Russian trained by Heinrich Neuhaus in Moscow, was a friend of Ivanovs. He revels in the sometimes splenetic demagoguery as well as the reticent poetry. Ivanovs is said to have applauded his interpretation. The early interpreters of the concerto were Konstantins Blumentals, Nikolajs Federovskis.
The Andante (track 4) is said to be for 'cello ensemble'. This must be a mistake. It sounds to me like a full string orchestra. The movement is nothing short of a meditation rather in the spirit of the Barber Adagio but with a theme rather like the slowly rocking epilogue-dream of Bax's Third Symphony or the central episode of the same composer's Summer Music. The 'meditation' is interrupted by a more lively yet still earnest section with the hand of Shostakovich firmly on Ivanovs' shoulder before a return to grey Baltic introspection. This is in much the same genre as Sibelius's Rakastava. The radio tape masters have suffered some tape damage although this only impinges on the listener's pleasure towards the end of the piece.
The Tenth Symphony is in four movements launched by a Dialogo (at just over ten minutes the longest), then a Toccata Basso Ostinato, an Intermezzo and an Allegro Moderato. Both the Dialogue and the Finale are raucous, anxious, rushing and imitative of the pell-mell paranoia of the quicker sections of an Allan Pettersson symphony. The Toccata is motoric and doom-filled like a Khachaturian presto. The Intermezzo breathes in long paragraphs - a cross between a string mesto by Roy Harris (say from symphonies, 3, 6 or 7) and Martinu's Concerto for Double String Orchestra, Piano and Timpani. This is a work strong on atmosphere but it does not feel symphonically rounded.
You must not expect state of the art sound but this is a small price to pay for the experience of hearing such rare and often rewarding music. I am not quite sure what to make of the symphony but both the Andante and the Concerto (Ivanovs' last of three - the other two have already been issued by Campion) are works with obvious attractions in terms of early 20th century neo-romanticism.
The liner notes are very full and in English and German. They are plagued with typos. I hereby volunteer to check over the next set of notes.
These are ADD recordings and I suspect that the Tenth Symphony is in mono.
Rob Barnett, MusicWeb, April 2002