Three for the Road

Sofia Gubaidulina July1981 Sortavala ©DSmirnov.jpg

David Nice’s course on Russian Music—a total of forty sessions, each 2-3 hours in length—completed last week. The music, however, lives on. Here are three works, one each by Sofia Gubaidulina, Alfred Schnittke, and Lepo Sumera, featured in the final installment of Nice’s Russian Music tour de force.

Farewell to Dodecaphony

In the June 10 edition of his Russian Music class, David Nice explored “End of the Thaw and musical life after Khrushchev.” Nice wrote:

“Khrushchev’s sudden rages against jazz and abstract art signalled a closing-down of hard-won freedoms. Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony, setting a range of poems by the young iconoclast Yevgeny Yevtushenko, was a surprise casualty. Meanwhile, dodecaphony was having its impact on a younger generation of composers, but not for long: we see how with Alfred Schnittke and the Estonian Arvo Pärt.”

Isserlis+Denk+Saint-Saëns

Camille Saint-Saëns

David Nice’s terrific Russian Music Course started up again last week, with Steven Isserlis and Elizabeth Wilson as guests. “But Saint-Saëns isn’t Russian,” you might say, and you would be right.

A Feast of Chamber Music

Thanks to David Nice’s Russian Music class, I’ve been introduced not only to a wealth of chamber music I didn’t know, but also to a cornucopia of brilliant musicians. In a past class, this included Boris Giltburg, and in the most recent class Alina Ibragimova and Benjamin Baker—and through Baker, Daniel Lebhardt.

One Fifth and One Sixth

Prokofiev Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major, Op. 100 (1944)