Exploring the CD Collection, #10

Vasily Kalinnikov: Symphonies nos. 1 and 2
National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine
Theodore Kuchar, conductor

There's always been something about unfulfilled youth that seems quintessentially tragic, the idea of a person with so much talent removed from the world before they have a chance to make their mark, before they get the opportunity to do the things they can really do. The sadness of a death is magnified by the fact that not only is the person gone, but all of the works that person was ever going to create. In classical music, the canonical example is usually thought to be Mozart, who only lived to be thirty-six years old. In truth, I've never held Mozart's early demise as all that tragic, because those staggering works of his last year -- the 40th and 41st Symphonies, the Requiem, The Magic Flute -- are so amazing that Mozart's death is almost rather like an example of a person departing the world at exactly the right time, even if that happened to be while he was still young. Better examples of composers gone too early are America's own George Gershwin -- who knows what might have come from the pen stilled so soon after Porgy and Bess? -- and the Russian romantic composer Vasily Kalinnikov.

Kalinnikov lived almost exactly one-hundred and ten years after Mozart, and died at almost exactly the same interval (Mozart 1756-1791, Kalinnikov 1866-1901). But where Mozart was probably the greatest musical genius of all time and reached musical maturity early enough to produce many great works, Kalinnikov was merely a highly talented composer who was only reaching maturity when he died. Thus his name is very obscure, and he is known almost exclusively by his two Symphonies.

These two works are full of all of the things you'd expect from a symphony by a Russian romantic: broad, lyric themes set in confident orchestrations. The first movement of the First Symphony, in particular, features a particularly catchy tune that always has me humming it for quite a while afterward whenever I listen to the work. The last movement is full of wonderful orchestral details, such as a section where the second subject is played by the low strings while the woodwinds execute a fluttering obliggato over the theme -- it suggests springtime warbling of birds, for lack of a better metaphor -- and a magical way in which Kalinnikov turns the very delicate melody from the symphony's slow movement into a powerful brass chorale. Some of Kalinnikov's transitional passages are awkward and some of his ideas seem unconnected, but overall, these two Symphonies make me wonder just what he would have produced had he lived beyond his thirty-fifth year.

This particular CD is on the Naxos label, and it's a well-recorded, muscular rendition of the two Symphonies. I also own a recording of the Symphony No. 1 performed by the Royal National Scottish Orchestra (or is it the Royal Scottish National Orchestra? or the Royal National Orchestra of Scotland? I can never remember....) conducted by Neeme Jarvi. I don't recommend that recording because it has extremely cavernous sound that makes me wonder if the performance was taped in an aircraft hangar. I'm also told that Arturo Toscanini recorded at least the first Symphony, but I haven't heard that one.