Firma Melodiya presents an album dedicated to the anniversaries of two great figures of Russian culture of the 20th century – Sergei Yesenin (1895–1925) and Georgy Sviridov (1915–1998). “Once … I met a poet I knew, and he spent a long time reading Yesenin for me. That’s when Yesenin’s verses imprinted themselves on my soul. When I got back home, I could not fall asleep… The music came suddenly. … That was how I wrote my first song to Yesenin’s text which later became a core song in my Poem to the Memory of Sergei Yesenin. The rest of the songs were composed during two weeks, all at once”.
The premiere of the Poem to the Memory of Sergei Yesenin took place in 1956, in Moscow and was a new milestone in the composer’s career properly unveiling his original style and subtle feeling for poetry to the public. On the other hand, Sviridov’s Poem where the composer strived to render the poet’s spiritual side and passionate “love for the native land” became an actual rehabilitation of Yesenin’s poetry which had been covertly prohibited for a long time.
Soon after completion of the vocal and symphonic Poem, the composer came up with the cycle My Father Is a Peasant for tenor, baritone and piano where Yesenin’s images of Russian nature and scenes of country life were expressed by means of chamber vocal lyric music.
Wooden Russia, a small cantata for tenor, men’s choir and orchestra was composed in 1964 and had an epigraph taken from Yesenin’s verses “Russia, my wooden Russia!”. The poet’s four poems recreate an image of old patriarchal Russia while the last lines of the final movement herald its tragic demise.
Georgy Sviridov’s cantatas set to the poetry of Sergei Yesenin are performed by the Republican Academic Choir led by Alexander Yurlov and such luminaries of domestic conducting art as Yuri Temirkanov and Gennady Rozhdestvensky. The chamber cycle is sung by Alexei Maslennikov, an outstanding interpreter of Sviridov’s music who is accompanied by the author.
