Classical Music

This release marks the launch of a new recording of the complete symphonies of composer Aram Khachaturian (1903-1978). Aram Khachaturian is considered to be one of the leading Soviet composers. He is known for his concertos, three symphonies, and 25 film scores. His style is dazzling, and features colorful harmonies and driving rhythms as well as improvisations. The second symphony is the cornerstone of this release. Unlike the first and third symphonies, this work has a classical structure with four movements and an easy-to-follow language. It is popularly known as the “Bell Symphony” for its forceful opening measures.

These idiomatic piano transcriptions of Khachaturian's ballet scores and incidental music are performed by Armenian music specialist Mikael Ayrapetyan. Includes the famous 'Sabre Dance' and 'Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia'.

Classical Music

In the 1960s Aram Khachaturian engaged in a number of experiments in which he covered terrain situated at an astonishing distance from the immediately appealing tone of the works that he had composed prior to those years. These experiments included the first of his three concert rhapsodies, in which he completely emancipated himself from the established forms that he had filled out in his concertos for piano, violin, and violoncello, which already then were world famous. While the virtuosic ambitions of the rhapsodies are in no way inferior to the technical demands of their older sister works, he now requires what is perhaps an even higher measure of expressive shared experiencing and solo messaging. The direct juxtaposition of the two concert violin compositions recorded by Antje Weithaas and Daniel Raiskin and the Rhineland-Palatinate State Symphony Orchestra conveys the extraordinarily grand leap into a “modernism” that hardly anybody would have thought possible for the author of the Sabre Dance. In 1971 Aram Khachaturian was honored for his rhapsodic risk-taking when he received the State Prize of the Soviet Union for his second concert trilogy.

Aram Khachaturian was an established Soviet artist when he realized an old dream of his in the first postwar year 1946 and composed a grand, quasi-symphonic work for his main instrument. Following his spectacular concertos for piano and for violin, which in the meantime had taken the world by storm, he now surprised his public with music that only gradually reveals its fiery temperament: we hear very clearly how well the composer knew the violoncello, the instrument on which during his study years he had practiced until his fingers hurt, in all its special qualities and how precisely he knew how to bring out its expressive and velvety autumnal personality. Neither this concerto nor the Rhapsody composed by Khachaturian seventeen years later for Mstislav Rostropovich can be mastered with mere virtuoso ostentation. Both works demand the services of a soloist who does not misunderstand the unprecedented difficulties of his parts as an opportunity for self-display, and Daniel Raiskin has found such an interpreter in the person of the Swedish cellist Thorleif Thedéen: sovereign in every technical respect, he surmounts the enormous challenges even when he removes himself from the intensive dialogues with the orchestra and – left entirely to his own devices – captures the whole of Khachaturian in the monologues.

Aram Khachaturian conquered the world with the boundless delight he took in composing. His Sabre Dance found its place in advertising, his Adagio from the ballet Spartacus accompanied a cult series, and prominent ice skating pairs danced their way into the hearts of their spectators to the Waltz from his stage music to Lermontov’s Masquerade. On the other side, his symphonic music and concertante works even today continue to attract the greatest conductors and soloists. A unique, often imitated, but never reproduced synthesis consisting of fascinating instrumental virtuosity, exotic melodies, highly imaginative harmonies, and irresistible rhythmic spirit distinguishes the three concertos and three concert rhapsodies written by Aram Khachaturian during 1936-46 and 1961-67, and this double trilogy begins its cpo journey with the earliest and latest of these works. The Armenian pianist Stepan Simonian, who resides in Hamburg, the Russian conductor Daniel Raiskin, and the Rhine State Philharmonic, which Aram Khachaturian himself accompanied a good forty-five years ago during his visit to Germany, get things going on this quasi-authentic recording of these two concertante works for piano and orchestra timelessly reflecting each other like a mirror in a mirror.

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REVIEW:

You can hear the really extraordinary pianistic qualities of the soloist in the piano concerto recording.

– Klassik Heute

KHACHATURIAN Spartacus • Michail Jurowski, cond; German SO Berlin; RIAS CCh • CAPRICCIO 5112 (2 CDs: 136:50)


Recorded between September 1996 and February 1997, this was reviewed more than two years later in three short, unfortunately uninformative paragraphs by John Bauman in Fanfare 23:2. I say “unfortunate” because this was, at the time, the first new recording of Khachaturian’s complete ballet to come down the pike in 25 years, and since this Jurowski set appeared, the only other Spartacus completes I’m aware of have been released on DVD and Blu-ray only, including the live 1970 black-and-white, mono Bolshoi performance cited by Bauman.


Khachaturian is one of those Soviet-era composers Western academics and critics tend to dismiss as a tool of the Communist regime. Deeply shaken by the infamous Zhandov decree in which he, Shostakovich, and Prokofiev were denounced in the same breath for their formalist tendencies and anti-proletarian music, Khachaturian, more than the others, took the censure to heart and truly repented the error of his ways. He then applied himself to writing music that would please the Soviet authorities, winning in the process a number of State prizes and awards, including, in 1958, appointment to the fifth Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. In Russian eyes, Khachaturian had been successfully rehabilitated and his official reputation restored. In Western eyes, he had been debilitated, seen as a sellout to a corrupt and repressive government apparatus.


Spartacus was completed in 1954, and with choreography by Leonid Yakobson it was first staged in 1956. This was well after the nasty Zhandov business and during the period in which Khachaturian’s standing was back on the rise. In fact, the ballet won him a coveted Lenin Prize.


The ballet’s storyline purports to reenact actual historical events, though as with all such adaptations, liberties are taken. Spartacus, King of Thrace, and his wife, Phrygia, are taken captive by the Romans during one of their conquests around 75 B.C. There’s enough blood, gore, and sex to satisfy everyone. Phrygia is domiciled with the Roman consul’s concubines, Spartacus is sent into the gladiators’ ring, and Aegina, a nymphomaniac if ever there was one, incites the crowd to a bacchanalian orgy. Spartacus marshals the other male captives and slaves in a rebellion against the Romans in what was documented by Plutarch as the third and final Servile War or the War of Spartacus (73–71 B.C.). The uprising was ultimately put down and in the end, at least in the ballet, Spartacus is impaled on a spear and Phrygia weeps to the strains of a mournful chorus. Highlights of the score, of course, are the bacchanal scene and the famous Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia upon their initial escape.


The quality of Khachaturian’s score is uneven. The music undoubtedly fits the stage action at any given moment, but it sometimes seems to play as background music in a film soundtrack, a medium with which the composer was not unfamiliar. This may be a main reason why Spartacus has been filmed more times than audio-only versions of the complete ballet have been recorded. Seen in its most recent and popular 1968 Bolshoi choreography by Yuri Grigorovich, the music makes sense. Heard straight through as a strictly orchestral score, rather than in one of its suites made up of choice excerpts, there are stretches that lose their reason for being when disassociated from their visual staging.


For those, however, who do wish to experience the full score in an audio-only recording, Jurowski’s Capriccio version is colorful, well characterized, highly dynamic, and unreservedly recommended.


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

REVIEW:

While Spartacus will probably never replace Gayane in the affection of the general public, it remains a colorful and exciting score in the composer’s characteristic style. In reviewing the complete score played by the Bolshoi under Algis Zhuraitis (IMP), Lawrence Hansen was pleasantly surprised how much good music the complete ballet has...Zhuraitis’s familiarity with the score gives the music a coherence, drama, and compactness most recordings of the suite lack. On Capriccio Michail Jurowski’s Berlin players lack the sheer Russian character of the Bolshoi, but his smoothly blended strings and healthy vigor have much to recommend them.

-- American Record Guide

The expressive immediacy of Aram Khachaturian's music, with its sensuous melodic writing, vibrant orchestration and rhythmic drive, resulted in a popularity equaled by few composers of his generation. Composed in 1936, the Piano Concerto was the work that established Khachaturian’s name. Cast in the customary three movements, it is scored for a sizable orchestra, with notable contributions from both side-drum and military drum in the percussion section. In the second movement there is also an extensive solo for a so-called ‘flexatone’; it is often put forward that Khachaturian in fact intended the part to be played on the musical saw, as it is on the present recording. Thirty years after the Concerto, the composer returned to the genre with his Concerto-Rhapsody for piano and orchestra. This time the score offers prominent roles for the xylophone, marimba and vibraphone, which contribute towards making this one of the composer’s most colorful works. The demanding solo parts are here performed by the young Jordanian-Palestinian pianist Iyad Sughayer, with spirited support from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Andrew Litton. Sughayer made his acclaimed début as a recording artist with an album of Khachaturian's piano works and sandwiched between the two works with orchestra he here presents the piano version of one of the composer's best loved pieces, the Masquerade Suite with its yearning opening Waltz and closing Galop.

KHACHATURIAN, A.I.: Violin Concerto / Concerto-Rhapsody

Selections recorded November 26-December 2, 1994

KHACHATURIAN, A.I.: Spartacus, Suite No. 4 / Masquerade / Ci

Classical Music

KHACHATURIAN, A.I.: Piano Concerto / Concert Rhapsody