Grechaninov: Symphonies Nos. 1 And 2

Regular: £11.49

Sale: £11.49
Regular

Out of Stock

Unit Price: per

Cat No: 8555410

Release Date: 05 January 2001

Label: Naxos - Nxc / Naxos Classics

Packaging Type: Jewel Case

No of Units: 1

Barcode: 747313541027

Genres: Classical

Composer/Series: GRECHANINOV

Description
Alexandr Tikhonovich Grechaninov (1864 - 1956)Symphony No. 1 in B minor, Op. 6Symphony No. 2 in A major, Op. 27, \PastoraleAlexandr Tikhonovich Grechaninov was born in Moscow in 1864, the son of a barely literate tradesman. At school he sang as a soloist in the chapel choir and at the age of fourteen began piano lessons, encouraged by his sister-in-law. In 1881, in spite of his father's opposition, he entered the piano class of Tchaikovsky's friend Nikolay Kashkin at the Conservatory in Moscow. In 1885 he became a pupil of Vasily Safonov, taking lessons in composition from Sergey Ivanovich Taneyev and lessons in fugue from Arensky. His active career as a composer began with a setting of a poem by Lermontov in 1889.In 1890 Grechaninov left Moscow Conservatory and moved to St Petersburg, where a scholarship enabled him to study under Rimsky-Korsakov at the Conservatory. He married in 1891 and had his first significant success the following year, when his Concert Overture was performed. In 1894 his first string quartet won a prize in the Belyayev Chamber Music Competition, and taught the piano in St Petersburg and subsequently in Moscow. In the latter city he interested himself in the music of ethnic minority populations, working in the music section of the ethnographical society of Moscow University and in this connection wrote a considerable amount of children's music. At the same time he received an annual stipend in recognition of his services to church music, although his later use of instruments in liturgical compositions made its church use impossible. The Revolution of 1917 put an end to his church pension and the uncertainty of the times led him to seek a future abroad, at first in London and in Prague. In 1925 he moved to Paris, where he remained until the threatening situation of 1939 persuaded him to seek safety in the United States of America, a country he had already visited on a number of occasions for a series of concert tours. In 1946 he became an American citizen and died in New York ten years later.While recent critics have found much to admire in Grechaninov's children's music, in his arrangements of songs from the minority peoples of the Soviet Union and in his liturgical music, little serious attention has been accorded his more substantial orchestral compositions. Immediate posterity tended to follow Rimsky-Korsakov in rejecting the very technical competence that marked the work of Anton Rubinstein and that of many of the younger composers trained at the newly established Conservatories in St Petersburg and Moscow. Such proficiency was tainted for some with the cosmopolitan or German, and for a later generation marred by allegedly bourgeois tendencies. In his First Symphony, which displays this very competence in structure and orchestration, there is a winning use of Russian thematic material. Nevertheless the work lacks the fashionable primitive crudity of the dilettante Nationalists. There is a fine Russian first subj
Tracklisting