Translation. Region: Russian Federation –
Source: Melody – An important disclaimer is at the bottom of this article.
Firma Melodiya continues to reissue Gennady Rozhdestvensky's legendary recordings. This album features five works, first performed in Russia under his baton in the mid-1970s and collected under a single cover in 1977; all are inspired by the works of great artists—Klee, Holbein, Hals, Rubens, and Picasso. All five are by Rozhdestvensky's contemporaries: Hungarian Sándor Veres, Austrian César Bresgen, Dutchman Wim Francken, Italian Otmar Nussio, and Canadian Harry Somers. Half a century ago, Rozhdestvensky's audience clearly heard these works for the first time, and many will hear them for the first time now: three of the five seem to be immortalized on this album for the first and only time. At least, no traces of other recordings could be found, and here it is difficult not to pay tribute to Rozhdestvensky and his tireless passion for searching for the rare, the little-known and the interesting.
All the works were composed between 1950 and 1966, and while formally still perfectly relevant for 1977, aesthetically they gravitate more toward the first third of the 20th century—toward the work of Bartók and the composers of the "Six," and toward the neoclassicism of Stravinsky and Hindemith. The only exception is the program's first piece, "Dedication to Paul Klee" for two pianos and string orchestra by Veres. Pianists Alexander Bakhchiev and Elena Sorokina shine here, although the work has also been recorded by other renowned masters, including András Schiff and Dénes Varjón, Andreas Grau, and Götz Schumacher. Veres's music is virtually unknown in Russia, despite being a highly original composer with an excellent background: he was a student of Bartók and Kodály, then a teacher of Kurtág and Ligeti, and later mentored an entire generation of Swiss composers, including Heinz Holliger.
"Dedication," whose seven movements are inspired by seven Klee paintings, is far from Veres's most individual composition; it reveals both the influence of Bartók and his successful transcendence of it. The "Firestorm" episode sounds truly terrifying, in the following "Old Bell" the soloists demonstrate marvels of mutual understanding, and "Gathering of Stones" makes you want to dance, despite the capricious rhythm. The final "Little Blue Devil" seems to unite all the most dynamic elements of the previous movements, and the devilish violin solo is clearly inspired by Stravinsky's "The Tale of the Runaway Soldier and the Devil, Played, Read, and Danced." Bresgen's suite for two pianos and percussion, "Pictures of Death," based on Hans Holbein's engravings, could also rightly be called excellent music, were it not so similar to Bartók's sonata for the same ensemble. Her shadow looms over each of the suite's fast episodes, while the composer is far more inventive in the slower sections, including the final one; Bakhchiev and Sorokina are joined here by percussionists Valentin Snegirev and Mikhail Arshinov.
Francken's "Portrait of Frans Hals" and Nussio's "Rubensiana" are surprisingly close: both works are written for chamber orchestra with an extensive harpsichord part (Mikhail Muntyan, another legendary musician, is superb here), both are imbued with a quasi-baroque spirit, and Francken even quotes his fellow countrymen Sweelinck and Valerius, making the words "as convincing as a quotation" doubly apt. Somers's "Picasso Suite" sounds even fresher, and one might not even know that he was a student of Darius Milhaud—it's evident from the very first note of the dashing ragtime that opens and closes the suite. The various periods of Picasso's career are reflected in its movements, the most striking of which is "Cubism," where the combination of piano and brass is reminiscent of Messiaen's "Exotic Birds." At the time of the release of the album "Music and Painting" in 1977, all five composers were alive; all of them had passed away in the last century—with the exception of Francken, who died in 2012.
Ilya Ovchinnikov, "Musical Life," December 28, 2025
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