Kalinnikov: Symphonies Nos. 1 And 2

Description

VasilySergeyevich Kalinnikov (1866 -1901) SymphonyNo.l in G Minor SymphonyNo.2 in A Major  Vasily SergeyevichKalinnikov was born in 1866 at Voina, in the Oryol District, where Turgenev,Henry James's "beautiful genius", had been born in 1818. The son of apolice official, he was allowed, through the ecclesiastical connections of thefamily, to study at the seminary in Oryol, where he took charge of the choir atthe age of fourteen. In 1884 he went to Moscow as a scholarship student at the Philharmonic Society School, taking lessons on thebassoon and in composition with Alexander Il'yinsky and the self-taught Pavel Blaramberg,a statistician by profession. The poverty of his family which had made itimpossible for him to study at the Conservatory forced him to earn a livingplaying the bassoon, timpani or violin in theatre orchestras and furtherweakened his health, already affected by childhood privations. He was able toprofit, however, from the friendship and teaching of S. N. Kruglikov.  In 1892 Kalinnikov'sfortunes seemed about to take a turn for the better, with his appointment, onthe recommendation of Tchaikovsky, as conductor at the Maliy Theatre in Moscowand the following year by a similar appointment at the Moscow Italian Theatre,but a few months later his deteriorating health compelled him to resign inorder to seek in the relative warmth of the South Crimea a cure for thetuberculosis from which he suffered. He was to remain in Yalta for the rest of hisshort life, completing there his two symphonies, and, among other instrumentalworks, incidental music for the play Tsar Boris by Alexey Tolstoy,staged at the Maliy Theatre in 1899.  Towards the end of hislife Kalinnikov received some financial relief through the good offices ofSergey Rachmaninov, who had visited him in Yalta and been appalled at the conditions in which hefound him living. The latter's intervention with the publisher Jurgensenbrought an immediate sum of 120 roubles for three songs and an offer to publishthe score, parts and piano-duet transcription of the Second Symphony, whichhad its first performance in Kiev in 1898, a year after the first performanceof the First Symphony, which was also heard in Moscow, Vienna andBerlin. Rachmaninov also arranged payment for a piano arrangement of theearlier symphony, but Kalinnikov did not live to benefit from his new agreementwith Jurgensen. He died early in January 1901, before his 35th birthday. Hisdeath induced Jurgensen to offer Kalinnikov's widow an unexpectedly high sumfor the rest of her husband's manuscripts, with the remark that he paid becausethe composer's death had multiplied the value of his works by ten, a sadreflection on commercial reality.  Kalinnikov's SymphonyNo.1 in G minor, written in 1894 and 1895, was first performed at aRussian Music Society concert in Kiev in 1897 under the direction of Vinogradsky. Itwas dedicated to Kruglikov and is generally regarded as representative of thebest of his achievement