Translated material
African tango in honor of Haydn
Matching Yakovenko with his author's approach to the material is an ensemble of nine people, the basis of which was the famous Moscow String Quartet of Evgenia Alikhanova. Among the performers are such outstanding soloists as drummer Valentin Snegirev and clarinetist Lev Mikhailov: the clarinet solo in the “Arles” movement is one of the best moments of the recording. Although the music is gloomy, and the words are often saturated with despair, an unusually bright image of the lyrical hero remains in the soul, whose heart is breaking with love for life, for work and for everything that he sees around him. A striking example is the fragment “The Potato Eaters,” which tells the story of the famous painting and sounds against the background of rhythmic knocking. This cart rolls the artist into the village: he sees with horror how the peasants take potatoes with the same hands that were sorting the ground, at the same time he is delighted by the sheep, the shepherd, and the road.
Noteworthy is the virtuoso piano part performed by Mikhail Muntyan, a famous pianist who took part in the premiere of Shostakovich's last work. True, if you look back at the classics of the 20th century, “Van Gogh’s Letters” resembles Alban Berg rather than Shostakovich; the center of the opera, the instrumental “Sorrowful Music”, where only strings sound, shows Fried as a worthy heir to the classic of the New Vienna school. Following the publication of recordings by Mieczyslaw Weinberg, Boris Tchaikovsky, Alexander Lokshin, Melodiya again turned to repertoire rarities and again made no mistake, releasing a recording that was clearly non-commercial and at the same time priceless.
Eisenstadt Haydn Trio. D2H -- Homage to Haydn (Capriccio). It cannot be said that new piano trios often appear now - a genre in which Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and Shostakovich created their best works. All the more remarkable is the project “D2H - Homage to Haydn”, within the framework of which eighteen trios for piano, violin and cello were commissioned from living composers. The initiator was Harald Kaushik, pianist of the Eisenstadt Haydn Trio, famous for its interpretations of Haydn; The cycle is dedicated to the 200th anniversary of the death of the great composer. The project involved six composers from Austria, six from other European countries, six from other continents: Australia, Argentina, Japan, USA, South Africa, China. The most important thing is not to listen to all eighteen trios in a row, so that they do not merge into a single mass. But if you take a break after each one, you will be surprised to find that this program contains approximately equal amounts of random and real music - a very good result.
“My language is clear to the whole world,” these words of Haydn became the motto of the whole undertaking. The initiative of the Eisenstadt Haydn Trio is more ambitious than it seems: its prototype was a project a century ago, when, for the 100th anniversary of Haydn’s death, a cycle of plays was written by the major French composers Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, Paul Dukas, Reynaldo Ahn, Vincent d'Indy, Charles Widor. The triple album D2H cannot boast of such a level of names; More famous than others here are the Argentinean Lalo Schifrin, the author of the music for the film “Mission: Impossible,” and the American William Bolcom - his “Songs of Innocence and Experience” several years ago received a Grammy in three categories, and the great Isaac was once a soloist in Bolcom’s quintet Stern. The names of the other composers mean little even to an expert. But this is, perhaps, even for the better: you can evaluate eighteen trios without regard to their high-profile reputations.
The situation is more complicated with “a language understood by the whole world.” Does it exist at all in modern academic music? What to do with the form, which has become a problem for almost half of the authors? Although the trios are short (lasting no more than nine minutes on average), many are astonishing in their watery structure, with no exposition, no climax, no ending. All the brighter against this background of luck - for example, the trio of the Chinese Xiaogang Ye, inspired by Haydn’s “Creation of the World”, without a single random note. In Two Nguni Dances, Bongani Ndodana-Breen (South Africa) was inspired by both Haydn and African folklore - the result is the most joyful and energetic trio of the cycle, where the contrast of fast and slow movements is as convincing a device as it was 200 years ago. And Bolcom's rondo “Haydn, go seek” sounds like a selection of fragments from all the classical trios in the world.
The Austrian Jüri Everhartz begins his opus with a clear imitation of Astor Piazzolla’s “Great Tango” and ends with a dashing Hungarian dance, where he takes on both Brahms and Bartók as co-authors. Surprisingly, Piazzolla is clearly heard in both Shifrin and Elena Katz-Chernin from Australia, although if this is not considered a drawback, their compositions can be considered among the successes of the program. It is hardly a coincidence that two, perhaps the best numbers of the album were created by the Austrians: the completely classical trio of Helmut Hedl is enlivened by strange syncopations and an unusually creaky - like a bassoon - cello sound in the finale, and Johanna Doderer's trio is written in an almost romantic language, but adjusted for achievements of German music of the first half of the twentieth century.