Tubin: Kratt (Complete Ballet Music) / Sinfonietta

Album review

Eduard Tubin is to Estonia what Jean Sibelius is to Finland, a composer whose 11 symphonies helped bring Estonian music into the world's concert halls and to establish a national identity for Estonian concert music. Kratt, Tubin's only ballet and the first Estonian ballet of any kind, was a key work in establishing a symphonic platform for Estonian folk motifs, much as Peer Gynt laid a similar foundation for Norwegian folk forms. Heretofore, Kratt has only been known from its ballet suite, expertly recorded in 1985 for the BIS label by Neeme Järvi and the Bamberg Symphony. Eduard Tubin: Kratt on the Finnish Alba label makes the complete ballet music available for the first time, in an excellent performance by the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra under Arvo Volmer. Kratt (officially meaning goblin) is sort of like an agrarian Frankenstein monster or Golem, built by a greedy farmer with assistance from the Devil to steal gold and make the farmer rich. As one might surmise, things do not turn out for the farmer as he might have hoped in the end, and likewise Tubin himself may have thought he'd made a deal with the Devil in composing Kratt, as it ran into so many problems. Inspired by an encounter with Zoltán Kodály, Tubin composed this ballet for entrance in a 1940 Estonian composition contest, which he lost owing to the work's mildly modern, Stravinskïan idiom. After a major overhaul, the work was premiered in 1943 and was a huge success, lasting more than 30 performances, despite the Nazi occupation of Estonia. During a revival in March 1944, the theater in which Kratt was playing was hit by a bombing raid, and the full score was destroyed, along with all of the props and costumes. Working from a set of parts, Tubin raised the work again in 1960 with slight changes, and this is the version recorded here. Kratt bears some similarity in its idiom to Stravinsky's Petrushka, except that it is lighter in tone and more than twice as long. The second disc is filled out with Tubin's Sinfonietta on Estonian Motifs, a work exactly contemporary with Kratt that deals with Estonian folk melody on a more compact scale than in Kratt. Alba Records in Finland are making some of the best quality recordings on the planet -- warm and full but with no instrumental detail left behind and just enough distance to provide a comfortable concert ambience. Musically, Kratt is nowhere near as esoteric as it might seem from its story, and one wonders why it is not as popular as Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. Who knows? Perhaps someday it shall be.
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