Thursday, October 16, 2008

In the Steppes of Central Southern Connecticut

College friend visiting for weekend = lots of apartment cleaning, little radio show planning. But expansive romantic-era Russian works = easy to phone it in!

Playlist 10/16:

Modest Mussorgsky: Prelude to Khovanshchina (1874)

Anton Arensky: Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor (1894)

Mily Balakirev: Piano Concerto No. 2 in E-flat Major (1861, rev. 1906, completed by Sergei Liapunov)

Alexander Borodin: In the Steppes of Central Asia (1880)

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 2 (1873, rev. 1880)

I really like that Balakirev concerto, which is seriously obscure. Hard for me to judge the piano writing, but on the whole it's a colorful and dramatically effective work, on solid Russian-nationalist-symphonic ground. The reoording is in Hyperion Records' series of forgotten romantic piano concertos; I picked up the disc a while ago since it's got Rimsky-Korsakov's curious single-movement piano concerto on it too. In a better world this stuff would get aired out in concert now and then.

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