Embracing the World

Last year was one that could be said to be about many things for me, but perhaps most of all 2025 was my “Year of Britten”. I’m fudging things a bit here: my drastic reevaluation of the English composer’s music actually started in late 2024, after I pulled down a recording of his Lachrymae to listen on a whim. It was in 2025, however, where the essence of his music, the breadth of his genius were fully revealed to me.

Way back in 2010, when internet hook-ups and romance were still a breeze, I was on OKCupid and on my profile noted the music of Britten among the things I disliked most. This caught the attention of another user — not a young woman as I had hoped, but instead a gentleman oboist who lived in Long Beach. We had a friendly exchange of opinions. “Whaddaya mean you don’t like Britten?”, was the general thrust of his argument, followed by his personal evaluation of the composer’s mastery. I recognized those qualities, I told him, yet they somehow didn’t add up to a satisfying whole for me. Basically, his music to me seemed more about expression than actually being expressive.

Now that another third of my life has passed, imprinted with many formative experiences along the way, Britten’s music makes sense to me. And one of its salient qualities that is most appealing to my forty-something self is how adult it is. Which isn’t to diminish other composers who may be more immediately impactful on a youthful listener. After all, nobody would ever claim Beethoven or Chopin are less great because of how captivating their music often is to the young. But there is an essential remoteness to Britten that may be difficult for someone younger to attune themselves to. It certainly was for me to do so back in my teens and twenties.

It’s interesting to observe how, in a way, Britten’s music stands apart from his time. Yes, I know that his music, particularly in the early years, was marked by developments in 20th-century music. But rather than hitch himself to one stylistic trend or other, Britten remained sui generis; he belonged to no movement and although he continues to inspire subsequent generations of composers, he never became the progenitor of a “Britten school”.

I thought about that while listening to the Four Black American Dances by Carlos Simon last month at Disney Hall. In some future post I’ll write at greater length about my feelings for this superb American composer, but what struck me on this first listening of his music was how Brittenesque it is. Not that it is imitative of Britten. Simon is very much his own artist, his music shaped by influences that the Englishman could never have known (or cared) about. What they do have in common is an intrinsic earnestness of expression. Grotesquerie and irony inform much of their music, true. Both composers, nevertheless, are upfront with their listeners that there is no time to trifle about. Simon’s music is also distinctive in its responsiveness to the times, albeit in a topical manner that recalls composers like Theodorakis or Rzewski rather than Britten. Stylistically, however, Simon’s music, like Britten’s, heeds no school or ideology.

In an issue of the old Tower Records Pulse magazine (some resourceful person ought to scan these and make them available online), there was an interesting interview with Rautavaara. I no longer recall verbatim what he said, but towards the close of the interview he said that being a composer in the late 1990s was like being a boy who could play with anything in his toy chest. As frivolous as that simile may be in reference to the music of Britten and Simon, it succinctly illustrates the cornerstone of their art: a sense of eclecticism that drives the Mahlerian urge to embrace the world.

NYE thoughts on Utopian dreams — and nightmares

My wife and I were trying to decide which movie from the Criterion Channel to watch while we dined in anticipation of the new year. “Why don’t you pick The Shining”, she told me. “It’s kind of a New Year’s movie”. (She had in mind the crowd photo at the end of the film — which is dated July 4.)

For some reason it was only during this viewing that I took notice of the music, despite having seen the film several times at home and in theatres. “Oh, it’s Bartók”, I blurted out as Shelley Duvall and Danny Lloyd first wandered through the Overlook Hotel’s vertiginous garden maze.

When The Shining was released in 1980, the postwar avant-garde was already in retreat; various tonal restorationist sub-genres, with East Coast minimalism at the forefront, on the other hand, were all in the ascendant. That reminded me of an epiphany I had over a decade ago, during Southwest Chamber Music’s three-year John Cage retrospective: what the postwar avant-garde had sought was not to alienate listeners, but to forge a new world wherein a composer from anywhere could communicate to any listener in a musical Esperanto that would be immediately intelligible and unimpeded by barriers, physical and cultural. No longer would music be associated with the by-products of suspect ideologies that had led to the most destructive war in European history. In the new, rational Atomic Age, music could indeed be a universal language.

These ambitions were never achieved, particularly because of animosity from the cultural establishments of the United States and the Soviet Union, which is somewhat ironic given that both nations espoused beliefs that on the surface seemed sympathetic to this sort of utopianism. Ultimately the music of the postwar avant-garde did attain a kind of universality: as part of the musical grammar of filmic horror. William Bolcom once wrote in the New York Review of Books that Boulez — and by extension the music he represented — had “terrorized” the musical establishment of the mid-20th century. According to Bolcom’s way of thinking, the excerpts from works by Bartók, Ligeti, and Penderecki that magnify the horror of The Shining are probably especially fitting.

Rethinking a Russian master

After uncertainty and worry over the “Liberation Day” tariffs, the year 2025 is ending with my Japanese CD-collecting habit still going strong. Mostly. Because since Buyee now distributes the pain of the tariffs equally — whether one is a weeb buying plastic figurines of their “waifu” or a kook like myself placing sniper bids on oddball private-press CDs of Japanese regional orchestras  — I’ve had to temper my whims. A recent release, entitled simply Mravinsky in Helsinki, however, was too good to pass up.

The label, Janus Classics (spelled with an idiosyncratic “v” in their logo), is one that I had only first heard about earlier this year by way of a batch of Paul Kletzki CDs that are currently on my “to buy” list. The big works on this Mravinsky set are Tchaikovsky 5 and Shostakovich 5, both of which have survived only piecemeal. Damage to the latter’s master tapes is so extensive that the entire first movement is lost. What remains suggests that the performance, recorded live at the 1961 Sibelius Festival, had it survived whole, would have been the best in Mravinsky’s discography. So just a curiosity for die-hards then, right?

Janus’ high production values, first of all, are impressive. Classical music CD covers are often ugly, even infamously so. The cover of Mravinsky in Helsinki, designed by Di Xiao, consists of a photo of the conductor with the Leningrad Philharmonic, centered within an elegant gainsboro frame that features the album title, with the opening measures of the Shostakovich’s “Largo” embellished along the spine. Open the booklet and you find essays on the conductor and recordings, but before you even start reading them you notice the fine paper they’re printed on. As you begin to read the essays by (in order of appearance) Nam Li, Qiao Huang, Brian Wang, and Jiewei Xiong, you realize that this isn’t the glib fluff typical now even in specialist archival reissues. (That is if they’re even included at all.) Even the plastic jewel case — sturdier and thicker than usual — evinces the care that Janus took in producing this release. Already cutting corners at the turn of the century, record companies in the last decade have pushed it even further, lovelessly dumping recordings onto CDs as the kind of e-waste they apparently believe them to be. Janus, on the other hand, seems to believe that their releases aren’t just “content”, but living testaments of a past most of us were not fortunate to experience. Holding this Mravinsky in Helsinki set in my hands one thing was clear: we’ve come a long way from the bad old days of labels like Gramofono 2000, Iron Needle, Doremi, and Classica d’Oro.

Conductors from yesteryear, unlike those of today, indulge in dramatic interpretive shifts that are rewarding to listen and study. At least that’s how obsessive collectors like myself justify the purchase of yet another live Beethoven 5 conducted by Furtwängler. (Maestros as impulsive and mercurial as Knappertsbusch, the wild man of the podium, are rare in any age.) Mravinsky, as his widow told the DSCH Journal in 2002, was different:

Each time Yevgeny Alexandrovich immersed himself in a score he had studied before, he would discover new nuances and colors, just as a geologist strips off layer after layer as he works towards the discovery of true facts. He always strove towards the essence of a work and for a high standard of performance, hopefully revealing a new aspect of the composer and enriching our understanding of him.

For a listener seeking an immediate fix of musical thrills, Mravinsky’s lofty goals can seem unexciting. Which is maybe why his stock has plummeted with Western collectors since the 1990s, when his work was thoroughly exhumed by Olympia, BMG, and other labels. I, too, quickly moved on after a brief and intense interest in Mravinsky during my teens. But in April 2020, when businesses began to reopen after the pandemic lockdowns, I bought a clutch of Mravinsky CDs at Record Surplus in Santa Monica when they were liquidating their classical music section. These discs initiated a personal reexamination of the conductor’s discography that is ongoing.

Mravinsky belonged to the “fail, fail again, fail better” school of conducting: each of his performances of a given work was another step towards the realization of its unattainable ideal. To quote his widow:

Although Shostakovich was happy with the first performance, each time Mravinsky returned to the Fifth he introduced something new that he’d been able to draw from the depths of the piece: a nuance or an idea. In Mravinsky’s hands the score underwent changes, just as human life changes. Even the composer’s metronome markings, after repeated performances of the symphony, adapted to the atmosphere, like a human pulse.

Rather than mount the podium as a conquering hero, Mravinsky saw himself as a pilgrim repeating his ascent over and over again, his goal always visible over the horizon, yet ever out of reach. There is a vulnerability about this that I now find moving, even relatable. It’s amplified by the state of the Shostakovich 5 on this set  — a survivor despite its scars  — and the care with which the producers of this Janus release devoted upon it.

A Complete Unknown

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, Starokadomsky 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?

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 busyness 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”.

Virtually alone in his praise was Arthur Loesser in the Cleveland Press, who wrote that the Concerto for Orchestra was among the finest new works he had heard. Unfortunately for Starokadomsky, the Loesser man did not prevail.

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.