PRIOR Velesslavitsa TOCC0109 [RB]: Classical CD Reviews

“In spring 2009 Channel 4 sent the sixteen-year-old British-Russian composer-conductor Alex Prior around the world: his task, to find ‘The World’s Greatest Musical Prodigies’ for a TV series with that title and to compose a concerto for them, which Alex would conduct.”

This is very much a young person’s project. Prior, now 16, is in the fourth year of his studies at the St Petersburg Conservatoire where his composition teacher is Boris Tischenko. He has read widely including Prokofiev’s diaries in Russian and Beowulf in Anglo-Saxon. His First Symphony (for strings and percussion) was completed in 2007. The symphonic poem Stalin’s March is said to bring out a certain barbaric brutalism. It’s from the same year as the one-act ballet Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and another ballet Mowgli. The Second Symphony The Northern of 2007 is dedicated to Grieg, Nielsen and Sibelius; the latter’s ostinati are glimpsed in the middle and final movements of Velesslavitsa. There have been two more symphonies since then, as well as an opera, a Second Piano Concerto and an oratorio Nevsky Prospekt.

Velesslavitsa means Glory to Veles. Veles is the Slav god of music. The music has an extravagant Russian early twentieth century nationalist feel linking the worlds of the orthodox plainchant, the primitivism of The Rite of Spring, a touch of Baxian-Rimskian (Russian Easter Festival) convolution with a Kodaly-style whirl and skirl. The mood is one of smoking fervour and volatile tension. The music is a shade diffuse in the lavishly expansive manner of Bax’s Symphonic Variations but holds the attention well enough. The second movement, expectantly tense, was inspired by a trip to Lake Ilmen some miles to the south of St Petersburg. The finale starts with the hammered emphatic drive of the finale of Nielsen’s Espansiva and leads intro an even more heated attack from the four solo instruments and the body of the orchestra. The voices of the four solo instruments - played by the very prodigies Prior had set out to find for his TV project - reach out distinctively from textures and melodic material familiar from Balakirev, Rimsky and Borodin. The massed horns resonate with vertiginous Brucknerian command. If one occasionally thinks of Shore’s scores for The Lord of the Rings and Poledouris’s superb music for the two Conan films what’s the harm in that especially when the music is as exciting as this. The composer tells us that the movements are linked by a variant on a 15^th century chant from Valaam Monastery in Karelia.

The acoustic of The Sage is very resonant - made in heaven for a great performance of Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances! No doubt the TV programme will help sales but this has its own intrinsic attractions.

Rob Barnett