Violin Concerto No. 2 opus 84

Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra
Vassily Sinaisky (conductor)
Sergei Stadler (violin)

Olympia OCD 123 (45 minutes: AAD)

To keep abreast of Olympia's invaluable series of Russian recordings is to experience delight and disappointment in roughly equal measure. But virtually nothing in that series and certainly nothing in the wide range of post-Shostakovich Soviet music I have encountered rivals Tishchenko's Second Violin Concerto for sheer inventiveness and communicative power. Even his own better-known works on LP—such as the First Cello Concerto which Shostakovich orchestrated (Melodiya) and the Third Symphony which he singled out for special praise (Supraphon)—pale into comparative insignificance. The concerto, completed in 1982, is regarded by the composer more as a symphony with violin than a concerto in the traditional sense. The four large movements propelled as much by the orchestra's contribution as by the soloist's, support that view. But this is no Brahmsian conception; rather it is a case of a concerto deliberately 'against the violin', in which the solo line on occasion buckles under the sheer weight of orchestral antagonism. It is music which moves between the Shostakovichian poles of terse epigram, macabre pageantry and bleak anti-pessimism. Its closest relative among recent violin concertos is probably Penderecki's, but Tishchenko's purging of self-pity and his greater sensitivity and musical resourcefulness put his work on an altogether higher plane.

The Third Symphony of 1966 seemed to be working out a fascination with the Second Viennese School, and even in the Second Violin Concerto a ghost of a Schoenbergian gavotte haunts the first movement. But interestingly enough Tishchenko's recent music shows a distinct move towards the style of Shostakovich (who was his mentor for three years of post-graduate study). The Fifth Symphony was composed in memory of Shostakovich in 1976. It not only incorporates his DSCH monogram into long melancholic lines but also quotes from the most violent pages of his Eighth and Tenth Symphonies and taps some of his most characteristic sound-images—sinewy counterpoint, glacial trills, an embittered slow polka. The result is not, in my estimation, so fully realized a work of art as the concerto. But it is still a moving tribute and one which displays solidarity with the essence of Shostakovich's art.

The haunting first idea of the violin concerto seems to announce that Shostakovich's late style has found its natural successor, and for a while the poker-faced juxtapositions and sphinx-like silences sustain that impression. But then it gradually emerges that the true point of departure is the Shostakovich of the Second, Third and Fourth Symphonies, Lady Macbeth and the like that most intriguing of historical loose ends. There is the same inexhaustible fund of square-shouldered rhythms and bizarre textures, the same Stravinsky-inspired intercutting of gestures, the same disregard for emotional moderation. Sonorities are vividly imagined earthbound Neue Sachlichkeit counterpoint stood on stilts, horns flourishing like a herd of elephants, harp-dominated sensuality undercut by dry taps on the wood-block, and so on. The last movement aims, perhaps a fraction less convincingly, at epic profundity, rather in the manner of the Passacaglia from Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony, it fairly crucifies its main theme before offering a pale glimmer of hope at the end.

Amidst all this the voice of the solo violin struggles against overwhelming odds. Its contribution is nevertheless a memorable one and Sergei Stadler is an impassioned and virtuosic soloist—recorded a good deal larger than life, but perhaps not inappropriately so. The orchestral playing is magnificent. I have tried to divorce the fact that the symphony is less well played and less well recorded from the fact that it impresses me rather less as a work, though obviously there may be a connection. But I am certain that the concerto is a genuine and important addition to the repertory and one that deserves to be taken up by violinists in the West.

David J. Fanning
Gramophone, December 1988