Telarc CD 80455
It’s not often that a musicologist inspires music of such heart-rending beauty. But Givi Ordzhonikidze, apart from being editor of a well-known book on Shostakovich, was one of Kancheli’s closest friends and staunchest supporters, and it was the sense of loss after his death in 1984 that prompted the composition of Liturgy (subtitled Mourned by the Wind). The other inspiration was Yuri Bashmet, for this four-movement 40-minute lament was originally a Viola Concerto (incidentally Bashmet’s own performance, on a Melodiya LP, is a shattering experience; Kim Kashkashian’s, on the ECM disc listed above and coupled with the Schnittke Viola Concerto, is only a fraction less fine). It goes superbly on the cello too, thanks to France Springuel’s passionate advocacy, and in this form it inevitably invites comparisons with Tavener’s The Protecting Veil.
A common feature of these two pieces, apart from isolated details of their neo-tonal-ecstatic style, is that they can seem almost unbearably moving if they catch you in the right mood and yet almost unbearably protracted if they don’t. I confess I listened to Liturgy this time through a veil of tears. Yet for all the obvious gestures of lamentation and assuaging, it is not a tear-jerking piece. In fact the texture is for the most part quite transparent, which allows us to meet the music half-way, and Kancheli constantly steers away from potentially manipulative cliches on to stonier paths (hear how the cello undercuts the orchestra with anxious rustlings in the third movement, for instance). The more intense the urge towards consolation the more the sense of inconsolability grows; as a result the blind rage which erupts in the second and fourth movements is painfully intense. The 12-minute first movement makes much of a simple rocking figure, as though soothing the pain of its harsh, cluster-ridden opening, and when the piano bass returns after about ten minutes you realize with a shock how carefully Kancheli has controlled the musical flow up to this point. Without that control Liturgy could hardly be so moving; likewise without the Flemish orchestra’s wonderfully controlled performance and Telarc’s superb recording quality.
Bright Sorrow again draws from the bottomless well of lamentation which is the ex-USSR composer’s special curse and privilege. This was a commission from the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the publishers Peters Edition, and it bears the dedication “To children, the victims of war”. Hence the choice of two boy soloists (superb singing here from Ian Ford and Oliver Hayes), to intone phrases from Goethe, Shakespeare, Pushkin and the contemporary Georgian poet Galaktion Tabidze, symbolizing the innocent victims of the last world war addressing themselves to the present-day generation and reminding us of our responsibilities to the future. The title, incidentally, reflects Goethe’s image of “Nacht wird heller” (“Night becomes brighter”), so Light Sorrow (as the disc has it) is a potentially misleading translation.
The soloists sing only slow, fragmented lines, “like an ocean contained in a drop of water” according to the composer, and marvellously conveying the fragility of innocence. These fragments are tied together (possibly unconsciously) by head-motifs from Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms and the famous Russian revolutionary lament Vi zhertvoyu pali (“You fell as a victim”) so beloved of Shostakovich and Soviet film-music composers, while the overall concept of polyglot texting and the fusion of pacifism and religiosity reflects a conscious admiration for Britten’s War Requiem.
The second half of the work seems to be gaining strength and optimism, but these are soon obliterated, leaving behind only a heart-broken crippled waltz, and the final climax recalls the vociferous protest near the end of the Sixth Symphony. Indeed if anyone has been wondering, as I have, where the best, or at least the most epic Kancheli went to after the Sixth Symphony (since even the Seventh Symphony feels rather like a half-hearted afterthought), here is surely the answer.
Highly recommended, whether or not you already have the Kancheli ‘bug’.
Gramophone, October 1997
This time, Kancheli’s epic stillnesses and cosmic eruptions didn’t convince me there was a real composer behind them. Take the second movement of Mourned by the Wind, a forty-minute, four-movement composition originally conceived for the viola player Yuri Bashmet, now receiving its premiere recording in what is probably its more successful reworking for cello and orchestra. Here, calls to attention – less cataclysmic than the kind he sometimes drops into his static expanses – are followed by the most obvious little echoing phrases you can imagine.
The effect is in the weird timing, but such cute posturing struck me as fabricated, somehow dishonest. ‘A faint trace of dried tears’? Perhaps: the work is a memorial to a close friend; the finale’s opening must rank among the biggest surprises in recent music. Such materials can – I’d still insist against the fulminations of the modernists – be made to speak to the human condition in the Nineties. But not for me; neither here nor in the 31-minute cantata Light Sorrow, despite committed accounts by these Belgian forces.
Keith Potter
BBC Music Magazine