Nicolas Horvath - Glass: Glassworlds Vol. 3

Melodiya presents a set of selected symphonies by Nikolai Myaskovsky. This composer's music is not widely popular today. Meanwhile, he belongs to the number of Russia's brightest music talents of the first half of the 20th century.His music organically combines old and new, traditions of classical music culture and keenness of expressionism, high tragicalness of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky and boldness of music avant-garde. Dmitri Shostakovich considered Mayskovsky 'the major symphonist after Mahler', and Sergei Prokofiev wrote that Myaskovsky 'was somewhat more a philosopher - his music is wise, passionate, gloomy and self-absorbed'. Symphony was the most important genre to the composer. His twenty-seven symphonies composed during 40 years are a sort of a personal diary reflecting a complicated and winding path of his artistic evolution. At the same time, they are a music chronicle of the age, a response of the big artist to the most significant historic and cultural events of the time. The set includes six symphonies from Myaskovsky's latter period (1935 to 1950) - Nos 16, 17, 21, 22, 25 and 27 - performed by the USSR State Academic Symphony Orchestra conducted by the outstanding Evgeny Svetlanov (the only conductor in the world to record all Myaskovsky's symphonies) and his predecessor in the State Orchestra Konstantin Ivanov, one of the major representatives of the Soviet conducting school.