Nikolai Myaskovsky-Symphonies No. 6 and 10

The (almost) ubiquitous 6th here performed by the Ural Philharmonic Orchestra under Dmitri Liss, plus the 10th symphony (The Bronze Horseman). Enjoy!

The Symphony No. 6 in E flat minor, Op. 23 by Nikolai Myaskovsky was composed between 1921 and 1923. It is the largest and most ambitious of his 27 symphonies, planned on a Mahlerian scale, and uses a chorus in the finale. It has been described as 'probably the most significant Russian symphony between Tchaikovsky's Pathétique and the Fourth Symphony of Shostakovich. (Myaskovsky in fact wrote part of the work in Klin, where Tchaikovsky wrote the Pathétique.) The premiere took place at the Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow on 4 May 1924, conducted by Nikolai Golovanov and was a notable success.

Soviet commentators used to describe the work as an attempt to portray the development and early struggles of the Soviet state, but it is now known that its roots were more personal. The harsh, emphatically descending chordal theme with which the symphony begins apparently arose in the composer's mind at a mass rally in which he heard the Soviet Procurator Nikolai Krylenko conclude his speech with the call 'Death, death to the enemies of the revolution!' Myaskovsky had been affected by the deaths of his father, his close friend Alexander Revidzev and his aunt Yelikonida Konstantinovna Myaskovskaya  and especially by seeing his aunt’s body in a bleak, empty Petrograd flat during the winter of 1920. In 1919 the painter Lopatinsky, who had been living in Paris, sang Myaskovsky some French Revolutionary songs which were still current among Parisian workers: these would find their way into the symphony's finale. He was also influenced by Les Aubes (The Dawns), a verse drama by the Belgian writer Emile Verhaeren, which enacted the death of a revolutionary hero and his funeral.

The Symphony No. 10 in F minor, Op. 30 by Nikolai Myaskovsky is among the more remarkable of the Russian composer's large output of 27 symphonies.

Composed in Moscow in 1926–27, it was inspired by Alexander Pushkin's poem The Bronze Horseman, which tells of a young man whose fiancée is drowned by the disastrous flooding of Saint Petersburg by the River Neva in 1824 and who curses the prominent equestrian statue of Peter the Great, only to be pursued through the city by the statue until he too is drowned.

The basic events of the poem may be discerned in Miaskovsky’s music, notably the flood in the opening passage (marked Tumultuoso), plus themes for the principal characters (the sole lyrical element, played Patetico on solo woodwind or violin, symbolizes the drowned fiancée) and the pursuit by the statue, a Presto Tempestoso fugue on a subject using ten of the twelve pitches of the chromatic scale. In fact Miaskovsky was not so much inspired by the poem as by Alexander Benois's illustrations to it.

In its form Miaskovsky's Tenth Symphony "collapses the elements of a four-movement symphony into a densely argued single-movement form lasting little more than quarter of an hour".

It requires a large orchestra, rich in brass instruments. Miaskovsky commented that the symphony was "filled with the deafening racket of four trumpets, eight horns and so on" and described it to Sergei Prokofiev as being "as massive as if it were made of iron".

The premiere was given in Moscow on 2 April 1928 by the conductorless orchestra Persimfans, but the complexity of the music defeated them. In 1930 Prokofiev managed to persuade Leopold Stokowski to give a well-received U.S. premiere in Philadelphia.

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