The problem with Miaskovsky, as with any prolific artist who is less great than Mozart, is that we feel daunted by the sheer bulk of his output: faced with 27 symphonies, of which in the past only two or three at a time ever seem to be available on record in the West, we feel that to listen to just a couple of them is at the same time risky (we might like them, and goodness! life is too brief to hunt out performances or recordings of the other 25) and trifling, as though one were to read The Antiquary and say 'Right: that's Walter Scott'.

On closer acquaintance he becomes more problematical still. I have not yet encountered a Miaskovsky symphony that strikes me as an unqualified masterpiece, but nearly every work of his that I have heard contains at least a hint that he was capable of masterpieces. Confound it: I shall just have to go on listening to Miaskovsky.

The Third Symphony (an earlyish, pre-Revolution piece) presents the Miaskovsky problem in a nutshell. It is in two movements only, respectively 21 and (heaven help us!) nearly 26 minutes long and both are dreadful warnings against judging a piece by its first few pages. Those of the first movement are not particularly promising: an angular but rather emptily rhetorical call to action, a vigorous, not especially characterful allegro theme and a darker, more lyrical one, robbed of eloquence by frequent pauses, are announced as the main material, and they are then energetically discussed for ten minutes or so, with plenty of incident and resource but not much genuinely memorable invention. Miaskovsky has saved the real development of his lyrical 'third subject' for perilously late in the movement, but it is worth the wait: a long-breathed melodic paragraph with real urgency and tension to it, it makes an almost radiant coda possible after all that glum turbulence earlier on. The second movement plays the same trick twice. Its opening disappointingly takes us back to the mood, even to the substance of the symphony's outset, again the contrasting lyrical ideas seem barren (and the dragging in of the germ motive from Franck's D minor Symphony is no help at all). But both subsidiary subjects flower later, one into a long and yearning melody that reminds us how much Prokofiev admired Miaskovsky, the other into an impressively solemn slow elegy which suggests that Shostakovich probably did so as well: the black, frozen coda inhabits a world that Shostakovich was often to visit.

The Lyric Concertino is still more vexing: a charmingly pretty, relaxed pastoral that reaches what feels like its coda after four minutes but goes on doing much the same thing for another four; a jolly dance that seems protracted at four and a half minutes; and a middle movement that ought to be monumentally boring (it is even marked andantino monotono, for heaven's sake) but turns out to be darkly, queerly gripping: a plain tune of very Russian cut leads to an obsessive six-note ostinato that has something of the archaic ritualism of Stravinsky's most Russian pieces to it. It is very rum indeed.

Spirited and vigorous performances, a bright but not glaring sound for the small chamber orchestra used in the Lyric Concertino, a few touches of congestion in the symphony. Well worth sampling, but beware: you may become a Miaskovsky Symphony Spotter.

Michael Oliver
Gramophone, January 1988