Something strange happens in Russian piano music during the half century between 1880 to 1930–from the Silver Age of the Romanov twilight to the Soviet Age of Steel. The Russian melos, that plaintive turn of tune derived from folk song, combines with a German contrapuntal rigor and obsession with virtuosity, imported by the conservatory teachers Pabst and Henselt, and gets stuffed into forms borrowed from Chopin. The result is a music absurdly difficult to play, yet broadly emotional in cast. Lizst gone bardic and Slavic. Mily Balakirev’s “Islamey” and Mousorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” inaugurate a musical world fantastic in its elaborations, weirdly obsessed with odd harmonic color, inclined increasingly to irrational or experimental musical narratives, and capable of moments of exotic beauty. A multitude of pianist composer came into being during the Silver Age, inspired to try they hand at the new musical language. There were a handful of geniuses–Rachmaninov, Scriabin, Prokofiev, Medtner, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Stanchinsky–there were extremely talented composers who wrote works of genius–Glazunov, Liadov, Liapunov, Alexandrov, Feinberg, Lourie, Blumenfeld, Miaskovsky, Tcherepnine, Kabalevsky–and there were certain peculiar composers who because of their individual ways of conceiving sound, accomplished a few interesting things worthy of attention–Catoire, Rebikov, Popov, Shcherbachev, Roslavets, & Krein. One enters into the ancient forest trailing the cries of the fire bird and wanders through landscapes so uncanny that they seem entirely alien to human eyes and ears, finally to emerge onto a vast grain field in some collective farm abutting a factory. There the music is the cycling of machines and the stutter of tractors.
One of my pleasures is serving as an advocate of figures and works in this tradition that have not received much exposure. Since the early 1990s I’ve collected the scores of most of the composers of the Silver Age and many from the Age of Steel. Because of the peculiar political and cultural forces at work in Russia during this era, the repression of talented persons was all too commonplace. My investigations have unearthed numbers of pieces and several composers who have come to haunt my ears. There are three composers, in particular, whom have striven to promote: Felix Blumenfeld, Anatolii Alexandrov, and Alexi Stanchinsky.
BLUMENFELD, Feliks Mikhailovich (1863-1931)
As a composer Blumenfeld showed a marked predeliction for the piano. His first works, created in the late 1880s evince a style that amalgamates features of Chopins idiom and that of Rubenstein. His characteristic compositional manner came to the fore in Opus 14 (1890). His major works (see comments below) tend to have an impassioned rhetoric (similar to Scriabin’s tempestuous pieces), a heavily arpeggiated texture (Joe Bratcher thinks that Henselt is the influence here), a strong melodic profile, and interlocking octave and chordal passages. Besides his piano works he composed a string quartet and a Tchaikowskian symphony, “To the Memory of the Beloved Dead” (Opus 39--a 1995 Russian Disc release RD CD 11 052 under the direction of Igor Golovchin is available).
2003 saw the CD release by the Finnish virtuoso Jouni Somero of a collection of Blumenfeld pieces for which I supplied the scores. Published by the Finnish FCR label, “Felix Blumenfeld Piano Works” is FCRCD-9706. Listen to the opening of Blumenfeld’s “Nocturne” to get an idea of his art. Click on the image of the CD Cover.
ALEKSANDROV, Anatolii Nikolayevich (1888-1982)
http://www.ticketsofrussia.ru/classics/archive/KondrashinPyotr/Stanchinsky
For my comments on other worthy masters of non-standard piano repertoire see http://www.kith.org/jimmosk/piano.html
In New Orleans the Shields family lived in uptown on the same block where Buddy Bolden, the black trumpeter usually identified as the progenitor of small ensemble jazz, lived. A large family, brothers Lawrence (Larry) and Harry played clarinet, Pat played guitar, and Eddie played piano. Like most white ragtime players at the beginning of the century, Larry and Harry were employed by Papa Jack Laine in his loosely organized “Reliance Band.” Laine’s band employed Creoles (light-skinned African-Americans), including Theogene Baquet and Dave Perkins, and the music reflected “what worked” on the street and in the dance halls of the city. Larry in 1915 moved to Chicago at the invitation of several New Orleans ex-pats to work in bands there. In 1916 he joined a recently arrived group of New Orleans musicians, playing clarinet for the Original Dixieland Jass Band. In 1917 they altered Jass to Jazz, giving birth to the name that lives today.
The band played heterophonic, rhythmic instrumental music jazz. Influenced somewhat by vaudeville players, they also incorporated novelty effects in their playing. They did not improvise much, having worked out counter melodies and riffs in practice that they tended to use routinely. Nevertheless, the bumptious energy of the new music was conveyed and communicated on the famous 78 rpm records recorded in 1917, the first widely disseminated performances in the style. You can listen to nearly every recorded side by the ODJB at the Red Hot Jazz site:
http://www.redhotjazz.com/odjb.html
Larry Shields is usually regarded as the premier instrumentalist of the band, and several of the pieces in which he shone became staples of the jazz band and later Dixieland repertoire: Clarinet Marmalade, Tiger Rag, and Fidgety Feet. Larry left the band in 1921, eventually settling in California. Harry Shields’s clarinet is one of the most precious of the early instruments preserved at the New Orleans Jazz Museum. You may view it here:
http://lsm.crt.state.la.us/collections/shields-clar.jpg
Larry died in 1953. His longer lived brother, Harry, was during the 1920s a mainstay of several white bands in New Orleans and Chicago. You can hear him play with Norman Brownlee’s band here:
http://www.redhotjazz.com/brownlee.html
His heyday as a player came with the Dixieland Revival after World War II. Then he became the studio clarinetist of choice by several recording companies covering the New Orleans scene. A handsome lady’s man who had a casual disregard for long term work, he appeared in any number of bands including the Dukes of Dixieland.
The family connection early inclined my interest in early jazz, New Orleans music, and eventually bebop and mainstream jazz. There are several WWW sites that do a wonderful job of celebrating the early music and New Orleans traditions:
The Louisiana State Museum Jazz Collection:
Louisiana Music Factory:
New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival:
The Red Hot Jazz Archive:
Offbeat Magazine:
Froggy’s New Orleans Jazz Site:
The William Ransom Hogan Archive of New Orleans Jazz, Tulane:
Jazz Roots:
And just for fun:
During the late 1970s my connection to the New Orleans tradition became personal. I was living in Hyde Park on the South Side of Chicago during my graduate student days at the University of Chicago. Also living in Hyde Park, off 57th-street, was the legendary Louisiana barrelhouse pianist Eurreal “Little Brother” Montgomery. I became acquainted with him during one of his gigs at a local tavern. Born in 1906, his earliest influence was Jelly Roll Morton. A rhythmic pianist with a keen singing voice, Little Brother Montgomery became a fixture at the weekend parties held in the turpentine camps of the deep south. Yet he was more versatile than the other boogie woogie pianists who emerged from the barrelhouse scene, playing at times with jazz bands, including those of Buddy Petit and Clarence Desdunes. In the 1930s he recorded on several occasions, producing several classics of the genre: “44,” “Vicksburg Blues,” and “Louisiana Blues.” For much of the Depression he led a band in Jackson, MS, and may have been the jazz player with whom Eudora Welty was most familiar. He moved to Chicago in 1941. Adelphi records filmed the pianist in 1969 playing “Vicksburg Blues” and the performance gives an accurate presentation of his playing when I encountered him.
http://www.adelphirecords.com/video/LittleBro.html
For five successive Thursday afternoons in 1978, I went over to his apartment for lessons in deep south blues piano. I didn’t have a piano in my apartment and had to practice on a piano in one of the University buildings, yet I made an effort to fix his techniques into my playing. Nowadays, my favorite style to play is barrelhouse piano, and the influence of Little Brother is particularly pronounced in the way I work the left hand. If you want to hear Little Brother at the peak of his artistry, buy “The Complete Recorded Works, 1930-1936,” on Document Records:
http://www.document-records.com/search/cdinfo.asp?docID=DOCD-5109
The autobiography of an ear. I have never lived in a house without music. My father was a devotee of classical music from Beethoven to Stravinsky. My mother doted on Broadway show tunes. There was a piano in our living room that was played every day. From the age of six I took lessons, but was a dilatory student. Having grown up in the 1950s and 60s I was ear witness to the seismic changes in pop music from Elvis to Jimi Hendrix. My circle of friends in suburban Maryland included folkies, cool jazz aficionados, and soul music fanatics. I played keyboards in garage bands, blue-eyed soul bands, a lounge quartet, and a black R & B review during the period 1966-69. I owned a Farfisa combo compact deluxe organ and later played on a Hammond B-3 with leslie speakers.
A versatile and gifted musician, Blumenfeld is best known to posterity as a teacher. He was the mentor of Barere, Grinburg, Neuhaus, Gauk, Dubyansky, Tiomkin, and Horowitz. Horowitz’s reminiscence of the charismatically elegant Blumenfeld, suffering from syphilus, his fingers incapable of demonstrating passages with his once spectacular technique, verbally directing Horowitz through experiments that led to his flat-fingered method is a testament to pedagogic genius. Blumenfeld himself learned from the greatest of 19th-century Russian pianists, Anton Rubenstein. Upon graduation from the St. Petersburg Conservatory, Blumenfeld was immediately retained as a piano instructor. He premiered most of the new compositions for piano by Arensky, Glazunov, and
Liadov in the 1890s. He also became one of the most important conductors in Russia, premiering Rimsky-Korsakov’s “The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh” and directing the first Russian performances of Scriabin’s “Divine Poem” and “Poem of Ecstasy.”
The longest-lived of the Russian composer-pianists who did not expatriate, Alexandrov’s career spanned virtually the entire Soviet epoch. He graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1916, a composition student of S. Tanayev and a piano student of K. Igumnov. Like his friend and classmate, A. Stanchinsky, Aleksandrov was influenced by the previous generation of Tanayev pupils– Rachmaninov, Scriabin, & Medtner. He wrote an opera, Two Worlds, for his graduation piece in 1916, but had already made a splash in musical circles with settings of Kuzmin’s Alexandrian Songs in 1915. His compositional style of the 1910s & 20s was characterized by L. Sabaniev as being lyrical, yet reserved, resembling N. Medtner’s, but with a decidedly more Russian placement. There was a strain of mellifluousness in the piano pieces up through Opus 31 that stood at odds with the Age of Steel brashness of the Soviet futurists, A. Mosolov, S. Feinberg, and N. Roslavets. His works were in the repertoire of most Russian pianists during the 1920s-30s. From 1923 until his retirement he taught composition at the Moscow Conservatory. In his latter years he remade his style (audible in a 1968 Melodiya set of lps D-02105-6). He composed 2 symphonies, three operas, and four string quartets. He was also a capable film composer. Yet his piano works are his lasting claim to fame. [A. N. Aleksandrov’s Works for Piano were published in a three volume collection (Moscow: Soviet Kompositor, 1966-70). A copy is on file at the Library of Congress.
STANCHINSKY, Alexi (1888-1914)
Serge Taneyev, of all the instructors at the Moscow Conservatory and the turn of the 20th century, was most revered by students of composition. A professor of counterpoint, Taneyev inspired devotion and respect from talents as various as Rachmaninov, Scriabin, and Medtner. Each in his way embraced his teaching about the the organization of melodic lines in composition. His most brilliant student, Alexi Stanchinsky (1888-1914), was the figure who proved most radical in the application of fugal forms to modern tonal schemes. Stanchinsky and Anatolii Alexandrov constituted the second wave of brilliant piano composers graduated by the Moscow Conservatory. Both began by taking figures of the previous generation as models–Alexandrov developing from Medtner, Stanchinsky from Scriabin. The earliest surving works by Stanchinsky, rescued by Alexandrov and Zhilaev, were preludes–refined, harmonically precocious, and moody–which won him notice in the salons of Moscow. The death of his father provoked a mental breakdown and hospitalization. The effects of his disease were never completely overcome, though he did secure release from the sanitorium. He kept an experimental literary diary, filled with extravagant religious speculations. He sought health in the countryside, began the study of folk-song and the works of Musourgsky, and began writing intricately fugal works in diatonic tone languages. He died, an apparent suicide, in 1914 shortly after the publication of his Opus 1. His pieces sound like no others composed at the beginning of the century. His death curtailed a talent that would have vied with that of Prokofiev and Shostakovich in the Russian musical firmament. Listen to several of his finest pieces by going to this link:
http://lsm.crt.state.la.us/collections/jazz.htm
http://www.louisianamusicfactory.com/links.asp
http://www.nojazzfest.com
http://www.redhotjazz.com/index.htm
http://www.offbeat.com
http://www.geocities.com/BourbonStreet/5135/jazzindex.html
http://www.tulane.edu/~lmiller/JazzHome.html
http://www.jass.com
http://www.eccentricneworleans.com
The music scene in D.C. during that period was complex. The city was very black. Phil Flowers was the local god among the R. & B. crooners. Roberta Flack was just coming into her own. The suburbs were awash with psychedelia, with odd pockets of country and even blue grass in the outlying areas of Virginia and Maryland. The gigs I played varied from Jr. High mixers to gospel shouts at the Fisherman of Christ tabernacle in D.C. One of the members of the R & B review was a heroin addict. By the time I was 18 I saw more of life than many witness in all their years. I was privileged to see performances at various times James Brown, the Cream, the Byrds, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, Aretha Franklin, and the Beach Boys with Brian Wilson.
I left this world when I left for college. At William & Mary I studied in the music listening lab in the basement of Swem library, going systematically through genres and periods of classical music. It was in the early 1970s that I developed my deep and abiding love for Russian piano music, listening to lps of the Prokofiev piano concertos, Rachmaninov’s Etudes-Tableaux, and Scriabin’s sonatas. In contrast, the graduate school years were occupied in learning jazz and blues. Living in Hyde Park, while attending the University of Chicago, I had the good fortune to take lessons in blues piano with Little Brother Montgomery, who lived then off 57th street. I romanced and married a musician, Lucinda Emley, who was attending the Eastman School of Music. In the early 1980s we were drawn to the New Music movement then burgeoning. We saw premiers of numbers of now classic minimalist pieces by Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Adams, and Laurie Anderson.
Moving to Charleston in 1984 did not divorce us from New Music, for the Spoletto Festival welcomed numbers of these composers to South Carolina. Lucinda, who had by this time become a stock broker, increasingly focused her musical talents on church music. I began collecting CDs. The CD revolution made available a wealth of Soviet material from the Melodiya archiva. Listening to this revitalized my profound love of Russian piano music. This time I went at my explorations with a scholar’s thoroughness, obtaining scores, reading musical history and journalism, buying old lps on the 2nd hand and rare vinyl markets. By 2000 I had one of the largest collections of piano scores by Silver Age Russian and Age of Steel Soviet composers. My discoveries led me to advocate the performance and recording of works by several composers, including Alexi Stanchinsky, Felix Blumenfeld, Anatolii Alexandrov, and Nicolai Medtner.
