Boris Tischenko-Violin Concerto, Cello Concerto, Suzdal

Northern Flowers offers up this lil gem of a disc of works by Boris Tishchenko. A very interesting and refreshingly unorthodox composer Imo. The Naxos world premiere recording of his Symphony No. 7 is especially fine, I will be adding it soon. Enjoy!

Boris Ivanovich Tischenko  (March 23, 1939 – December 9, 2010) was a Russian and Soviet composer and pianist.

He is often considered the direct heir to the legacy of Shostakovich, Tishchenko was born in Leningrad. He studied at the Leningrad Musical College from 1954 to 1957. There he learnt composition under Galina Ustvolskaya and piano under Mikhelis. Then from 1957 to 1963 he studied composition with Vadim Salmanov, Victor Voloshinov and Orest Evlakhov, and piano with L. Logovinski at the Leningrad Conservatory. He took a postgraduate course with the composer Dmitri Shostakovich from 1962 to 1965.

He taught at the Leningrad Conservatory from 1965, and became a professor there in 1986.

Tishchenko was an outstanding representative of the generation which appeared during the 1960s and which invigorated Russian musical life. His industriousness has rewarded him with a leading place in Russian music. As distinct from many of his colleagues, Tishchenko has remained in Russia and with a striking determination remains loyal to the principles which he once adopted, regardless of changes in political regimes and artistic trends.

With a list of some 130 works to his credit, Tishchenko is a prolific composer who has contributed to all the major genres. Folk and ethnic music have both played their part in his thinking, together with composers as diverse as Monteverdi and Mahler, in an idiom whose undogmatic approach to tonal thinking won him the approval of Shostakovich early in his career. This is particularly evident in the Third of his eleven symphonic works (1966), which the older composer singled out for the “richness of its emotions, its clarity of thought and its structural logic”, and the First Cello Concerto, written for Rostropovich in 1963 and re-orchestrated by Shostakovich for more conventional forces in 1969. Such an empathy reached its apogee in the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies, composed before and after Shostakovich’s death in 1975, where an avowedly public symphonism is pursued in impressively large-scale terms.

Tishchenko tried to use some experimental and modernist ideas like twelve-tone or aleatoric techniques, but was much more attached to the native traditions of his homeland. He demonstrated a kind of originality, scoring his Second Cello Concerto for 48 cellos, 12 double-basses and percussion (1969). Ten years later, however, he re-orchestrated it for a more practical combination.

He was honored by Shostakovich’s orchestration of his First Cello Concerto, and repaid his master by the orchestration, editing and transcription of a few scores by Shostakovich. His Requiem, to the forbidden poem by Anna Akhmatova, written in the period of political stagnation in 1966, was a courageous cultural gesture.

Tishchenko actively assisted in the secret delivery of the manuscript of Shostakovich’s memoirs to the West. Later, however, he raised his voice in dispute against the authenticity of Testimony published by Solomon Volkov in 1979. In March 2006 he was announced as the first laureate of the ‘Epokha Shostakovicha’ prize instituted for the centennial of Shostakovich’s birth. He died in Saint Petersburg.

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