For an artist eager to succeed, a well placed apologist can be the difference between speeding ahead of the line and oblivion. They can also do wonders for talking around or deflecting attention to deficiencies in native talent. Remember the “nepo baby” furor from a couple of years ago?
Although a child of relative privilege (at least in comparison to the likes of Georgy Sviridov or German Galynin), Dmitri Shostakovich had no need for the crutch of familial nepotism. Nevertheless, his material achievements would’ve been a lot more difficult to come by had he also not cultivated an extensive support network in Russia and abroad from a young age. It’s enough to remember Gavriil Popov, his Moscow-born contemporary, who once was spoken in the same breath as Shostakovich during the pioneering years of Soviet music. He died forgotten in 1973, a fate his widow rightfully decried as an injustice.
Or Mikhail Starokadomsky.
I didn’t know his name either until a few weeks ago, when Pristine Classics issued the latest in their series of Artur Rodziński’s broadcasts with the NBC Symphony, which included a performance of Starokadomsky’s 1933 Concerto for Orchestra.
Who was this composer? He was born in Brest-Litovsk in 1901, the youngest of two children fathered by the military doctor and polar explorer Leonid Starokadomsky. The younger Starokadomsky grew up in St. Petersburg and began to compose from an early age.
In 1921, he enrolled at the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied composition with Nikolai Myaskovsky and Sergei Vasilenko, as well as organ with Alexander Goedicke. Soon after, Starokadonsky was among the founding members of an informal new music circle known as the “Moscow Six”, which included fellow pupils Mikhail Kvadri, Lev Oborin, and Vissarion Shebalin. Around this time he also joined the Association for Contemporary Music.
Starokadomsky joined the faculty of the Moscow Conservatory in 1930, where he taught and later authored a number of important textbooks. His transition from post-Schoenbergian to neo-classicist was well under way by this point. Aside from being a composer, organist, and pedagogue, he also worked in programming for All-Union Radio and wrote musical criticism. His most enduring achievement was in the genre of children’s songs, for which he was awarded a Stalin Prize (third class) in 1952. He died in 1954, predeceasing his father by about a decade and his wife by several more. A Russian blog post implies that Starokadomsky’s death was the result of a chronic illness, but it didn’t specify which. He and his wife are buried at the family plot in Vvedenskoye Cemetery in Moscow.
It is tempting to hear Starokadomsky’s Concerto for Orchestra as a derivative of Hindemith’s from 1925, but their stylistic convergences are probably as much the result of coincidence as deliberate study. More telling, perhaps, are parallels between the Starokadomsky and Shostakovich’s 1940 Piano Quintet. In May 1941, Starokadomsky’s Concerto for Orchestra was hailed by Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky as a testament not only to the variety of expression that Soviet culture fostered, but also as an exemplary fusion of neo-classicism and socialist realist ideals. One wonders whether Shostakovich, who had been personally acquainted with Starokadomsky since December 1924, had the concerto in the back of his mind while he composed the Piano Quintet. Even more tantalizing is a potential earlier overlap between the composition of the magisterial passacaglia at the center of Starokadomsky’s concerto and the one in Act II of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District. Was it a coincidence that both these composers wrote passacaglias around the same time? (It should be noted that both men had been personally acquainted with each other since December 1924.)
Starokadomsky’s Concerto for Orchestra was perhaps his widest performed orchestral work. It was first played outside of Russia at the 1937 ISCM festival in Paris. Serge Koussevitzky, who was in attendance, later bemoaned to reporters that most of the music he had heard there was “wretched, positively wretched”. (Not an entirely fair appraisal, given that excerpts from Hanns Eisler’s superb Deutsche Sinfonie were also among the works performed.) Starokadomsky’s Concerto for Orchestra was one of only two scores Koussevitzky brought back to conduct for the Boston Symphony’s 1937–1938 season. (The other was Gian Francesco Malipiero’s Second Symphony.) After its US premiere on December 17, 1937, Cyrus Durgin, the music critic for the Boston Globe, praised the Starokadomsky concerto as “honest, unforced and buoyant, reasonably melodic, free from the extravagance of dissonance for its own sake”. His review of a subsequent performance a few weeks later solidified that impression. “Where more than one modern piece is merely noisy”, Durgan said, “Starokadomsky’s Concerto seems powerful”. Koussevitzky’s performances were followed by others in North America, Europe, and Australia conducted by a number of conductors, including Malcolm Sargent, Werner Janssen, and of course Rodziński. American reviews of the work ranged from Miles Kastendieck’s damnation by way of faint praise in the Brooklyn Eagle (“Its strongest claim for attention is effectiveness for whatever that is worth”), to Bruno David Ussher’s puzzlement in the Los Angeles Daily News (“I am offering a prize to anyone who will convincingly tell me why the Starokadomsky Concerto for Orchestra should have been broadcast on Saturday’s NBC symphony program”), to Herbert Elwell’s red-baiting in The Plain Dealer (“If this is the music of Communism, give me the bourgeois platitudes of Strauss”). Postwar critics, possibly influenced by the incipient Cold War, were even more hostile. London’s Daily Herald dismissed Starokadomsky’s concerto as so much business that could not “conceal the absence of anything worth calling a musical idea”. Then there was the bitchy takedown of the “so-called concerto” in Sydney’s Truth: “The music is bustling, perky, and brilliant — and says nothing”.
Alone in his praise was Arthur Loesser in the Cleveland Press, who wrote that Starokadomsky’s Concerto for Orchestra was among the finest new works he had heard. Unfortunately, the Loesser man did not prevail, for the concerto is an excellent piece of music. Had things gone differently, maybe its composer would've had a happier destiny.
Long forgotten composers tend to stay that way because of entrenched skepticism of the unfamiliar, as well as belief in an objective meritocracy of the arts. After all, if a composer was forgotten or ignored, they probably deserved it, or so people seem to think. It often happens, however, that the only things obstructing a fair hearing of a composer’s work are entrenched prejudices. Shostakovich had to contend with those too, but at least in his case — and unlike Starokadomsky — he had a little help from his friends.