Grechaninov - Symphony No.4; Cello Concerto; Missa Festiva

Alexander GRECHANINOV (1864-1956)

Symphony No. 4 (1927) 

Cello Concerto (1895) 

Missa festiva (1937) 

Alexander Ivashkin (cello)

Ludmila Golub (organ)

Russian State Symphonic Cappella

Russian State SO

Valeri Polyansky

The Fourth Symphony is dedicated to Tchaikovsky and is as consistently Russian nationalist as its three predecessors. Its Russianness intensified by isolation from his homeland the work was written in St Jean-de-Luz, in France not far from the Spanish border. There is a higher quota of angst in the first movement than we are accustomed to but Grechaninov's mainstream of flowing lyricism is much in evidence. The Vivo movement dashes and dances with all the swash of Glazunov's Fifth or the charging chivalry of Miaskovsky's Twenty-First or Eighteenth Symphonies. The andante marks time going through the Tchaikovskian motions rather than driven by them. Things improve with the crashing Allegro vivo - festive and lightly graceful (at 5.01) with a sprinkling of En Saga along the way.

The Cello Concerto makes for agreeable listening but I must part company with Alexander Ivashkin when he claims that the work 'is undoubtedly one of the best piece in the Russian cello repertoire'. The style is romantic, virtuosic, rhapsodic - closer to Saint-Saens than to Dvorak or to Tchaikovsky's Rococo Variations.

After the spiced and exalted nationalism of the Cantata coupled with Symphony No. 3 the Missa Festiva is back in the language of the other two Masses in this series. Seemingly with this work he trounced thirty-eight French and Belgian composers taking first prize in a competition. There is no denying the fluency of his setting and the truly clear and powerful singing reserved for the choral works in this series. That said these works sing in undenied beauty of comfortable and unruffled waters. They lack a challenging epic span.

With the concerto and the mass being pleasant rather than transfixing, our attention naturally centres on the symphony which is a good work though without the flare of the second and third symphonies.

Rob Barnett