Boris Tishchenko : Symphony No. 8, Violin Concerto...

Album review

Russian composer Boris Tishchenko studied with Dmitri Shostakovich during that composer's later years and was also influenced by another teacher (and Shostakovich student), Galina Ustvolskaya: her bent toward unusual instrumental combinations is audible in the 2006 Concerto for violin, piano, and string orchestra recorded here. Tishchenko has been sparsely programmed and recorded outside Russia, perhaps because there's a superficial similarity to Shostakovich in his music: he uses traditional forms, refers to the past in the same way, and is not far from his teacher in terms of tonality. Get beyond these factors to the meat of the music, though, and he's his own man. In the concerto, the roles of the violin and piano are differentiated in novel ways. Sample the second-movement rondo, where the folkish theme is the job of the piano alone; only later does that theme develop into the main material of the movement. Shostakovich did not treat concerto textures in this way. If you've thought that it was hard to write a melody nowadays that would leave people remembering it as they left the concert hall, try the one in the middle of the Interlude movement of the concerto, which at seven-plus minutes is more than an interlude. The Symphony No. 8 of 2008 was intended as a paired item with, but not as a completion to, the Symphony No. 8 in B minor ("Unfinished") of Schubert, to which it refers subtly. That symphony and the Three Songs to Poems of Marina Tsvetayeva, here presented in a newly orchestrated version, are world premiere recordings; the concerto may be the most distinctive of the three works, but all indicate that this is a composer non-Russians should get to know better. The performances by the St. Petersburg State Symphony Orchestra under Yuri Serov, who also wrote the useful booklet notes, are entirely idiomatic.
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