Miaskovsky's Second is a work of gloomy caste with a gaunt and protesting character you could cut with a knife. The basic 'colour card' spans the gamut of subdued colours. Rhythmically it tends towards reflection offset by a tramping snappy quick-march of a pattern typical of this composer. The overall effect mixes the Tchaikovsky of Symphonies 5 and Manfred, Rachmaninov's The Crag and Isle of the Dead with a hint of Scriabin's Symphonies 2 and 3. The orchestra is ample of girth: triple woodwind, 4 trumpets, 6 horns, 3 trombones, 2 bass tubas and timps. This is a symphony formed from swarthy, hammer-head clouds, anvil strokes, sheets of rain and electric storms.

The performance of Miaskovsky 10 (a work dating from the same year as Knipper's First Symphony and the Mossolov Piano Concerto No. 1) is consistent with the second symphony in its orchestral accomplishment. While No. 2 is in three movements each of about quarter of an hour, No. 10 is in a single compact span. Not altogether strangely the musical language is very close to No. 2: tawny, probing, stonily apocalyptic, grim and resentful and with a touch of Stravinsky (early), Sibelius (trembling strings) and even Debussy.

The recording quality is preferable, by a decent margin, to the Russian Revelation disc (no longer available anyway) which couples symphonies 2 and 22 in performances conducted by Kirill Kondrashin. Rabl (whose name I had not heard previously) runs Kondrashin and the USSR SO very close in capturing the spellbound depressed dramaturgy of it all. We should look out for his name again. I hope Orfeo will record some of the rarer symphonies. We need good recordings of symphonies 4, 14, 20 and 24 for a start. Some (all?) of these have never been recorded.

This is an excellent coupling. You may find the second symphony less difficult listening than the tenth so I suggest you start there. Thank you, Orfeo. Let's hear more.

Rob Barnett

Competent performances of the complex Tenth and more straightforward Second, both works heavily influenced by Scriabin

The elegiac autumnal conservatism that has made Miaskovsky’s Cello Concerto such a firm favourite (on disc at least) in recent years, is not the composer’s only mature voice. Prior to Stalin’s cultural revolution, he favoured a doom-laden, clammy mode of expression, owing much to the example of Scriabin expressly rejected by Prokofiev and Shostakovich.

The more remarkable of the two works recorded here is the one-movement Tenth of 1927; its idiom suggests a keen awareness of Prokofiev’s Parisian modernism and at least a passing acquaintance with early Schoenberg. The uncompromising, unsignposted nature of its polyphony taxed the conductorless Persimfans, a sort of ideologically motivated Orpheus Chamber Orchestra whose early performances of the piece broke down. Rabl’s Viennese forces are rather more competent, even if the interpretation as such could have been better shaped, with brazen climaxes erupting more meaningfully from the prevailing maelstrom. In the absence of strong melodic material, the score risks coming across as a purely academic experiment in dissonant chromaticism despite its conventional structural underpinnings. The opening promises much with its odd but characteristic suggestion of a Cesar Franck dragged reluctantly into the 20th century. Later on, the sound stage seems unhelpfully resonant.

The sombre Second Symphony was composed in 1912 when the composer, musically a late-starter, was only just completing his formal studies. Rachmaninov’s own Second is sometimes in evidence here, though Scriabin is the overwhelming presence, in the finale above all. The work is much more straightforward than its partner, and no doubt a good deal easier to play. This is not a CD for everyone – there are too many pages of dreary sequential writing for that – but Miaskovsky fanciers who have Kondrashin’s performance of No 6 (Russian Disc, 10/94) may well be drawn to it.

David Gutman
Gramophone, July 2000