Tishchenko: Yaroslavna - Symphony No. 3

Album review

Russian composer Boris Tischenko studied under both Galina Ustvolskaya and Dmitry Shostakovich and his music betrays the influence of Shostakovich and Igor Stravinsky. Yaroslavna (1974) is a long ballet composed for the former MALEGOT (Leningrad Academic Maly Opera and Ballet Theater, later renamed M.P. Mussorgsky Theater). Yaroslavna is based on the oldest Slavic text in existence; "The Tale of Igor's Campaign," an anonymous twelfth century work that deals with the failed military campaign of Prince Igor Svyatoslavich against the Polovtsians of the Don, taken from the same literary source used by Alexander Borodin for his opera Prince Igor. Whereas Borodin's work is wildly colorful and propulsively exciting, Tischenko's is extremely austere, harmonically bitter, and marked by long passages of male chorus chanting in Russian; as Northern Flowers does not provide a text for the work at all, you are on your own if you are not a Slavic speaker. Yaroslavna came along at about the same time the long-suppressed original versions of Stravinsky's Les Noces began to circulate, and this ballet does sound like what Les Noces would have been like had you removed the pianists and female voices and rescored it into Stravinsky's late, serial-derived idiom. While there are bursts of activity here and there, most of Yaroslavna consists of a dialogue between the male chorus and small instrumental groups, and for 90 minutes that can be incredibly dull.
Although the filler is advertised as Tischenko's Symphony No. 3 (1967), it is actually only the second and third movements of said symphony, performed by the Kirov Opera and Ballet Chamber Orchestra under Igor Blazhkov; at least the orchestral performance is a bit tighter than the sloppy MALEGOT orchestra under Alexander Dmitriev. While texture here is likewise very lightly applied, the music in the symphony is more interesting than anything in Yaroslavna. That said, it is still hardly compelling music: the symphony mostly consists of meandering polyphonic lines that go on and on, sort of like Rodion Shchedrin without the occasional bursts of burlesque. If one wants to take on Northern Flowers' Boris Tischenko: Yaroslavna, Symphony No. 3, he/she had better bring along tons of patience and understand that Tischenko's symphony as represented here in only a fragment.

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