Voices from the East: Karabits leads a musical marathon with a gripping finish

Eight composers were represented in this three-concert, day-long survey of music from the former Soviet republics. These statistics in themselves testify to a bold spirit of enterprise on the part of all involved: the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, their outgoing Chief Conductor Kirill Karabits, and the Royal Festival Hall. Only one of the composers (the Georgian Giya Kancheli) has gained any wider following beyond their borders, yet the music bore witness, almost uniformly, to a vibrant assimilation of personal, local and national character with classical principles.

Thanks to their series of Chandos recordings, the symphonies by Lyatoshynsky and Terterian were not as unfamiliar as they might have been, either to the orchestra or the audience, but I fancy that only the most dedicated arcana-fiend will have encountered Chary Nurymov’s Second Symphony in any format (or any other music by a Turkmen composer). Nurymov wrote it in 1984, though it could have been composed at any point during the previous half century, which might say something for the remoteness of Turkmenistan from either Moscow or Berlin (for reference, the capital Ashgabat lies 500 miles east of Tehran).

Nurymov’s Second formed an epic centrepiece to the first of the afternoon concerts, setting out in brooding fashion before pounding orchestral piano and sand-blaster brass took up a strenuous pursuit of resolution, which was reached 18 minutes later in a state of nervous exhaustion (shared by at least some of its listeners). Shostakovich’s Fifth serves as a reference point here, just as Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherezade is the jumping-off point for Nagilar (Fairy Tales) composed by the Azeri composer Franghiz Ali-Zadeh in 2002. The BSO strings were put through their paces by complex string heterophony and emerged triumphant, trailing ribbons of song in a pulsing surge towards a major-key celebration. The Seven Beauties Suite of Kara Karayev (or Gara Garayev, depending on the transliteration used) is a delicious extension of the Russian-Soviet ballet tradition; swooning strings, floaty flute melodies and glittering waltz rhythms almost make a pastiche of the style familiar from Stravinsky and Prokofiev, but Garayev’s craftsmanship stands on its own terms.

In the second concert, Styx by Kancheli proved the value of giving this music an airing in concert. The self-contained gestures and unrelieved gloom of his concert pieces demand patience and a theatre of the mind’s ear from the listener at home. Experienced live, however, Valeriy Sokolov’s keening viola soliloquies knitted those gestures together in dialogue with broken hymns from the Bournemouth Symphony Chorus, as an unlikely chapter in a book of 20th-century laments including Vaughan Williams’ Flos Campi and Feldman’s Rothko Chapel. When the chorus articulated “Alfred” and “Avet”, the journey of the work as a tribute to Schnittke and Terterian fell into place.

Interviewed through the course of the day by Tom Service, Karabits more than once sold him a hospital pass by insisting that the music be left to speak for itself. Terterian’s Third Symphony evidently touches him deeply and he led its alternations of ear-splitting catastrophe and desolate reflection with an attention to detail that paradoxically intensified the questions left unanswered. What does this music mean? Did Terterian compose it (in 1975) as a memorial to the Armenian genocide of 1915-17, or as a requiem for his brother?

My own feeling (not shared by members of the audience who gave the symphony an ovation) is that this music forcibly insists on its own depth and sincerity, on the basis of minimal material. There is no space for ambiguity: everything is shouted or whispered, projected in blinding light or pitch darkness. The listener’s mode is necessarily one of submission rather than engagement. Perhaps that’s what Karabits acknowledged when he remarked to Service that we should listen “emotionally rather than intellectually”, though it would be hard to imagine a less helpful preface (why not both? What is intellectual listening? Do we use a different pair of ears to listen emotionally?).

At any rate, Karabits saved the best for last with a trio of Ukrainian composers. A suite from Thomas de Hartmann’s ballet La Fleurette rouge was once more indebted to Rimsky, this time in Wagnerian vein, none the worse for that and deliciously pointed by the Bournemouth players. The opening tumult of Anna Korsun’s Terricone, premiered by Karabits and the BSO in January 2023, brought the single most arresting sonic image of the day, with bows scratching and yowling on polystyrene blocks: like nails on a blackboard for some, no doubt, but entirely original, and integrated within a satisfyingly developed form, musically sufficient unto itself but also a darkly impressive evocation of the industrial slagheaps of the work’s title.

It used to be said that composers from the East had no use (or less capability) in the technique of development which is a defining quality of the classical symphonic tradition. Statement, restatement, fragmentation and variation certainly dominated the processes behind most of the music of the day, which made the Fourth Symphony of Boris Lyatoshynsky all the more engrossing as a fitting climax. Karabits has already done a great service to the composer by rehabilitating the larger and better-known Third, but he demonstrated here that the Fourth, too, deserves a hearing at least as often as any Soviet-era symphony.

Bells chimed and tolled as they had done throughout the day, but now their messages (of warning or hope, both and more) capped a gripping symphonic journey, which had given notice of its inner necessity from the opening bars no less confidently than any essay in the genre by Shostakovich or Prokofiev, though the actual language is closer (stylistically as well as geographically) to Lutosławski and Penderecki. Karabits should record it (and the rest of Lyatoshynsky’s orchestral output). Given as an encore, the Farewell Serenade by Lyatoshynsky’s student Valentyn Silvestrov captured Ukraine’s most distinguished living composer in a nutshell, its wistful post-Schubertian mood instantly identifiable. With composers such as Korsun among his successors, there is every reason to believe in “Voices from the East” as a tale without a final chapter.