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Myaskovsky - Complete Symphonies and Orchestral Works | 
| Creators: Nikolay Miaskovsky, Evgeni Svetlanov
Label: Warner Classics Svetlanov Edition
Category: Music
List Price: £52.99
Buy New: £45.99
You Save: £7.00 (13%)
New (12) Used (2) from £41.39
Rating:  5 reviews
Sales Rank: 13641
Format: Box Set
Media: Audio CD
Discs: 16
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 5.4 x 5 x 1.9
UPC: 825646968985
EAN: 0825646968985
ASIN: B000XCTD5S
Release Date: May 26, 2008
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
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| Customer Reviews:
 A must for lovers of Russian music November 9, 2008
My experience was the same as that of Robert Livingston -- the wrong disc (a duplicate) in one of the sleeves (and actually the same wrong disc in the same wrong sleeve); and everything he says about the shoddy presentation is true. Any listener will want to correlate the symphonies with what was going on at the time in the Soviet cultural world, for which he needs at the very least the dates of composition: these, however, can be easily found on the internet, as can also informative reviews of previous issues of the individual CDs.
How good are these works? They are never as good as Shostakovich at his best, and never as bad as Shostakovich at his worst. Despite superficial influence from Scriabin and other innovators, we rarely get far from the emotional and musical world of nineteenth-century Russian symphonism (the modernist Symphony 13 is the great exception). But this was the fruit not of prudent conformism but of a profound cultural identity, and if the later symphonies are less personal than the earlier ones, this does not mean that they were less heartfelt. He rarely surprises one, but he had a gift for creating music that is urgent and maintains a sense of direction.
It is interesting to compare Svetlanov's interpretations with those of Gauk, the leading Myaskovsky interpreter of the previous generation. Gauk caught the restraint and nobility in Myaskovsky's personality, while Svetlanov sacrifices these qualities to passion and brio. As a result he holds one's attention in every single work -- a notable achievement --, but it would be a mistake to regard these performances as 'definitive' or uniquely 'authentic'. They need to be supplemented by reissues of the best of the earlier Russian recordings.
a revelation September 15, 2008
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
In 30 years of listening I had only heard just four of Miaskovsky's 27 symphonies. To explore them all has been a wonderful voyage of discovery. They are far more various and original than the usual critical summaries would suggest, with the 'middle period' works from the late 20s and early 30s as 'modern' as anything that, say, Copland, Honegger or Walton were writing at that time. And then the later works have a marvellous autumnal glow, suffused with melancholy.
Svetlanov's performances present each work with great vigour and character. The recording quality is a bit congested, but has been mastered to give reasonable consistency for performances that must have been spread over 15 years or more of studio sessions. And of course it's enthralling to hear these works performed by the kind of orchestra they were written for.
A very considerable bonus is the generous selection of additional orchestra works, including some true masterpieces.
But the set misses out on five stars for a number of reasons. The notes are dreadful. They don't even give dates of composition or recording. Symphony No 18 has been misnumbered as a duplicate No 8 (the opus numbers keep you right) and nothing explains that Symphony No 23 appears under the title 'symphony-suite'.
Worst of all, in working my way through the symphonies numerically, I discovered that the sleeve for disc 14 contained a duplicate disc 9, with only a few days to go before the time limit for returning the set had passed. So check the set carefully when you get it!
 A great Symphonist of the 20th Century now available to all September 8, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Until fairly recently Symphonies 4, 14 and 20 were a mystery even to musicologists in the West. Svetlanov's huge 1990's project (rumoured to be at least partly funded from his own pocket) has now made the symphonies of this great Russian composer immediately available. At the present time because of supply difficulties as the Olympia discs go out of circulation and the Alto discs come available, this is probably the best way to buy the music, and it comes out at about 2.63 per disc. The disadvantage is that there are hardly any notes about the composer or his works. If you are reading this you will have access to the internet, so if you put the composer's name into a search engine it will not take you too long to come up with a reasonable amount of information from Wikipedia and from the Myaskovsky home page. But I am still left wondering about some issues. For example, is the magnificent 3 Symphony with its Scriabinesque trumpet writing actually a requiem for that composer (the last seven or eight minutes of the finale are a wonderful funeral march)? Or is a a funeral for a world about to be destroyed (it was written in 1914)? Whatever, this particular symphony is a work of undoubted greatness and is one of the highpoints of the whole cycle.
Given the cumulative distress and pain of the Great War years for Myaskovsky - the shell shock and wounds of the Austrian front - closely followed by service in the Red Army during the Revolutionary War, the murder of his father on a railway platform by a "revolutionary" who became angry because the old man was wearing decorations and insignia from the Tsarist regime (he was, after all, General Myaskovsky), and the death of his aunt during the Petrograd famine of 1921, it is not surprising that the symphonies 4, 5 and 6 can be seen as a working out of the personal grief and anguish. This is an interpretation more in keeping with the composer's notion of his music as an expression of his deepest feelings. Symphony 7, which shares some thematic material with the slow movement of Symphony 6, is a 25 minute epilogue to this particular "period"of Myaskovsky's writing.
Symphonies 1 - 3 are "youthfully lugubrious" works and 4 - 7 works that take us up to 1925 and lay to rest the demons of national and personal tragedy (Symphony 6 is presented here in the alternative non-choral version so purchase of the very fine Dmitri Liss performance with chorus, coupled with Symphony 10 is recommended Myaskovsky - Symphonies Nos 6 and 10).
Symphony 8 is broadly based on the story of Stenka Razin; Symphony 9 is remarkable for the consonant dischords that make up the first movement; Symphony 10 is a one movement 16 minute work inspired by the illustrations to Pushkin's narrative poem "The Bronze Horseman"; Symphony 11 another "private work" and Symphony 12 is subtitled "Collective Farm". Symphony 13 is another tensely argued one-movement work.
By the 1930's Myaskovsky was writing, broadly speaking, "populist" even-numbered symphonies probably to satisfy the Stalinist regime and "personal" odd numbered ones. The 1931 "Collective Farm" Symphony 12 is based on a sychophantic poem and NOT on the realities of the raging Ukranian famine of the same year. But how much did Myaskovsky actually know, living in a police state with all the media censored? The Symphony 12 is as much an exercise in past, present and future as it is anything else, and so it has an aspirational quality that rises above any narrow propagandist agenda. Similarly, the "Aviation Symphony" (number 16) is inspired by the heroism of Soviet airmen (the Aviators' March written by Myaskovsky for governmental purposes is a testiment to heroic endeavour) in the face of the crash of the huge airliner Maxim Gorky.
After 1933 the element of experimentation takes a back seat and one could say that there is a move towards consolidation of technique and idiom. Probably this was to avoid censure by the Party, though individual journalists attacked some of the works. Myaskovsky's life obviously shows some of the tensions and difficulties of a major - perhaps THE major - composer of the Soviet era in his relationships with the Government. His diaries show that he was appalled by many aspects of the Stalinist regime, and yet during his life he was awarded an unprecedented 6 Stalin prizes for his music! There are some symphonies that are lighter than others (notably number 19) but at his best his art is moving, subtle, noble and inventive. Myaskovsky did not innovate in matters of orchestration and did not move much beyond Scriabin or Rachmaninov - but then again Richard Strauss was another great composer who did wonderful things with the orchestral sounds he inherited.
Symphony 22 is his initial response to the German invasion and 23 is a "lighter" piece based on folk tunes from the area into which he evacuated. Symphonies 24 and 25 may be a good place to start, surprising enough as they are at the very pinnacle of the composer's invention, but Symphony 26 - sometimes known as the "Russian" - shows something of the distress of his final years where the Zhdanov decrees (1948) singled out Russian composers for a new period of brow-beating. Shostakovich and Kahachaturian (to name but two) made the right noises and were sufficiently "repentant" but Myaskovsky's remark that the Zhdanov affair was "...not historical but hysterical" and his holding aloof from the whole thing caused his censure and the withdrawal of much of his music from the Soviet concert hall. The 27 Symphony deals with deeper matters of life and death and moving manages to conclude optimistically.
The Zhdanov affair towards the end of Myaskovsky's life, coupled with the fact that he had no estate or family to oversee performances after his death, led to the sudden neglect of the music that not even his "rehabilitation" seems to have cured. We should remember that it came 10 years after the composer's death and over a decade after a total ban on performances of his works in the Soviet Union - a really damaging period of neglect. Yet here is a truly great symphonist and he is presented by a whole series of remarkably good discs by Svetlanov. Now we can hear how good the music is there seems little excuse not to buy this whilst it is still available.
Miaskovsky and Svetlanov: A Symphonic Feast May 28, 2008
22 out of 22 found this review helpful
Finally, the complete Miaskovsky symphonies, all 27 plus numerous extras, all in one box. This must have been a labour of love for Svetlanov, for this was a mammoth undertaking, one only sporadically available on different labels. Now Warner issue the full cycle and now you must buy it, if you are at all passionate about symphonic music.
Miaskovsky could do anything. One minute he offers familiar Russian melancholy, the next we seem to have been teleported to English countryside. He plumbs the depths of depression, before reclining in some Persian palace sipping wine and savouring the jasmine. Russified Wagner, proto-Shostakovich, Sibelian snow flurries, Gallic accents: it's all to be found in this amazing, deeply emotional and tremendously exciting symphonic corpus.
The problem is that Miaskovsky is a dreamer, dreaming of better worlds, so he utilizes whatever comes into his head, regardless of whether or not the sound is reminiscent of other composers. A musical history is created by someone drawing a line linking various composers. Miaskovsky may have been neglected because he wasn't deemed to be dramatically original or influential, but by heavens could be compose glorious music. Such deliciously varied music, here given wholehearted performances.
I seem him now as a Brahms figure for the Twentieth Century. Someone conscious of what had gone before, but whose musical imagination is unmistakably of his own time. If he is still an unknown quantity to you, nows the perfect time to explore this large and affordably priced symphonic continent.
Why four stars? The booklet is really poor, with little more than a track listing.
At last At last At last At last! May 27, 2008
26 out of 27 found this review helpful
I can't repeat this too often: at last all the Symphonies of Nikolay Miaskovsky are available in good to great performances by an eminent Russian conductor: Evgenii Svetlanov. And the extra good news is: some unfamiliar shorter orchestral Works are on these 16! CD's too. Don't expect the Violinconcerto & the Celloconcerto, these aren't included. But they can be had from other (very good sources).
I started collecting CD's form the first day they were available over here (in Holland) and encountered the first Miaskovsky symphonies on the OLYMPIA label and hoped for a complete cycle. Nothing came of it although some of these readings were by Svetlanov. Later the Marco Polo label started recording them and I hoped for a complete cycle. Nothing came of it - and they were done by different conductors and different orchestras so very varied in recording quality and interpretation - but one of these CD's had the tone poem `Silence' op.9 which blew me over (it's on 1 of the 16 so listen to it, it's great). Years later I heard the rumour that Neeme Jarvi was going to record the symphonies for the Swedish BIS label but nothing came of it. A recording on Deutsche Grammophon of Miaskovsky's 6th (with conclusing choir) with the Gothenburg orchestra and Jarvi was released, so I bought that one, it's a good reading.
In 2002 I visited Japan and in Kyoto, at Tower Records of all places, I saw a 16CD box of all these symphonies I think on Svetlanov's own label and I DIDN'T BUY IT. Somehow I didn't trust it, thought it were pirated recordings and I didn't manage enough Japanese those days to ask the 13-year-old boy who was servicing the classical department. (Still don't but that's another story.) The price was wrong too: around (converted) 200 Dutch Guilders (100 Euro's) so that didn't help either.
On Ebay you'll find recordings of these symphonies (paired with 4 CD's in 1 box) on the Russian Disc label but that seller asks a fortune for the whole set too. So I didn't buy it.
Fortunately later in 2002 the OLYMPIA label announced they'd agreed with the Svetlanovs they were going to release all the symphonies in attractive packaging and with liner notes by the eminent Per Skans for the next 2 years and I was delighted and at last started collecting them. Disaster struck! OLYMPIA ceased operation and through the series (volume 10 I think) stopped production. I thought I'd never live to get a cycle complete.
I who was visiting every Svetlanov concert he gave over here in my own home town (he was chief conductor for 5 years of the Residentie Orchestra, The Hague.) was denied the pleasure of collecting these works. Delighted I was hearing that the Alto-label had bought the OLYMPIA rights for the Miaskovsky symphonies so there we went: collecting the rest of the series. And now, 4 CD's short of the completion of the OLYMPIA/Alto set: this 16CD box. I immediately ordered it! I suggest you do before it's too late! Grab as long as you can!!!!
Recording nor orchestral playing is perfect but the rawness of things is something Miaskovsky can handle, and Svetlanov's orchestra can too. Go for it and thank you Svetlanov, I'll remember you as long as I live.
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