Two Geniuses of Music for Piano – the First and the Last
It is not by accident that the piano compositions by Michael Ivanovich Glinka and Alexei Vladimirovich Stanchinsky, two composers who were quite distant from each other in terms of time and style, are recorded onto one compact disc. The connection between them seems to mark the boundaries of the time span for the Russian piano school of the 19th century, a century which, according to many, stretched as far ahead as 1914. That year marked the tragic death of Stanchinsky and the beginning of World War I, and with it of the new art of Russia and the whole world. No less remarkable is the circumstance of the two composers having so much in common in the inner spirit of their music, despite the immense difference of moods in it. Glinka’s music is similar to Pushkin’s verses: it is remarkably harmonious and sophisticatedly complex, its texture does not have anything redundant and its language is accessible to each and everyone. The music of Stanchinsky resembles the verse of the Russian symbolist poets; its language is vague and the poetical technique is on the verge of intricacy. Nonetheless, it also does not have anything redundant. And this lack of “redundancy” becomes a crucial feature both for Pushkin and for Glinka. The spirit of “pure” music, free from any exigencies, breathes in their music the way it wants to.
As is well-known, Glinka was the pupil of the famous John Field and in a famous spot in his “Memoirs” presented a vindication of his teacher, criticizing Liszt. “Neither I nor any other sincere admirer of the art of music would ever agree with the opinion of Liszt, who has once declared to me that Field played in a weak manner (endormi); no, Field’s performance was frequently bold, capricious and varied, but he did not distort his art with charlatanry and did not chop cutlets with his fingers the way most of the latest fashionable pianists do”. Glinka’s music in the virtuosic transcriptions of Liszt, Balakirev and Lyadov present the appearance to us as if it is dressed in a fancy concert suit, which does not fit its wearer in size. It is much more suited to the dressing gown with the hood from the composer’s celebrated portrait. Glinka’s “chamber” manner with its highlighted attention to concise articulation of each sound (Glinka’s music, similarly to Mozart’s, has “few notes”, but how exceptionally hard it is for some pianists who are able to tackle the most virtuosic passages by Liszt and Rubinstein to acquiesce their meaning), turned out to be long forgotten in Russia, which has been left for half a century under the dazzling spell of the Rubinstein brothers, who were, in essence, virtuosi of the Liszt school. Only at the very beginning of the 20th century with the dusk of Romanticism this tendency received an unexpected continuation in the music of Scriabin. The academician Assafiev, who perceived very subtly the tendencies of his time, wrote about this phenomenon as follows: “But let us say, for example, an exceptional, individual phenomenon – … namely, the pianist Scriabin – does he not evoke in our memories by some of his musical traits Glinka’s aesthetics of piano playing and his remark about John Field?”.
Alexei Stanchinsky was born on March 9 (21) 1888 in the village Obolsunovo, near Teikovo (presently, the Ivanovo region) into the family of an engineer. Along with many other young composers of his generation (including his colleague, Anatoly Alexandrov, who was born on the same year) he regarded Scriabin as his first idol, albeit, fortunately, not his sole one. Having moved to Moscow in 1904 Stanchinsky became a pupil of Sergei Taneyev, whose aesthetical positions were extremely opposed to Scriabin’s. A creator of a system of counterpoint, which was the only one of its kind, an astute specialist in the counterpoint from all the styles of the history of music, himself a virtuosic contrapuntal master, Taneyev instilled into the youth a love towards a fancy performance of melodies, which oppose with and combine with each other in the most diverse variations. It is not by chance, therefore, that we are able to find in Stanchinsky’s oeuvres numerous examples of canons and fugues. However, the harmonic foundation in these works comprises a bold musical language, opened by Scriabin for numerous generations ahead, lying beyond the limitations of customary diatonic intervals of the harmonic series. The few published compositions by Stanchinsky aroused a real sensation within the musical circles of Moscow and St. Petersburg. A rare kind of precision and elaboration of each phrase and each separate sound, forming phantomlike contrapuntal embroidery (these features were brought to life by the contrapuntal technique itself, which does not tolerate the question of “you could do it this way or that way”) is what distinguished the music of this newly emerged composer from the musical products of the numerous epigones of Scriabin. He was talked of as a new genius… but it all unexpectedly came to a close. The twenty-six year old composer drowned on September 20 in a small river, Balonovka, not far from Novospassky, the estate where Michael Glinka was born 110 years prior to that. Novospassky is where Stanchinsky is buried. The cyclical line, reaching far away from the center – Balakirev, Rubinstein, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and Lyapunov, was closed unexpectedly, in a mystical fashion, in the Smolensk region.
Unfortunately, the piano compositions of Glinka and Stanchinsky, presently, do not appear frequently in performance in the big concert halls. The necessity of listening attentively and sharing the intimate emotional feeling dictates quite different forms of realization for them – among small-scale audiences in small concert halls. Of course, the performer must also posses those qualities which in our times are quite rare: the ability to listen attentively to his own instrument and to control each note, so that the result would be, to use John Field’s expression in regards to Glinka’s music, “strong, delicate and happy playing”. Alexander Malkus, and ardent promoter of Stanchinsky’s music, belongs to particularly this category of musician, which is so rare in our times. When listening to his performance on this compact disc one becomes permeated with the remarkable phenomenon of the “small-scale” chamber piano style of playing, which frequently presents a greater amount of an inner emotional experience than the performances of “stars” in orchestras in large halls.
Feodor Sofronov
Translated by A. Rovner
