Alexander VEPRIK (1889-1958)
Dances and Songs of the Ghetto (1927) [9:44]
Two Symphonic Songs, Op.20 (1932 and 1935) [15:37]
Five Little Pieces for Orchestra, Op.17 (1930) [11:12]
Pastorale (1946) [11:10]
Two Poems (c.1955) [27:05]
BBC National Orchestra of Wales/Christoph-Mathias Mueller
rec. 2019, Cardiff
MDG SACD 901 2133-6 [74:51]
Alexander Veprik was born in Ukraine though his family moved soon after to Warsaw and then again to Leipzig. He studied piano with Karl Wendling and met conductor Arthur Nikisch but was fated to move back to Russia on the outbreak of the First World War. He was still only fifteen. Further studies were halted when Glazunov disliked an early symphonic poem by Veprik, an event that caused the young man to destroy the score and flee to Moscow where he studied with the more thoughtful Myaskovsky. He soon won a Moscow teaching post but battled to maintain his interest in Jewish music in the face of repressive politicised views. Finally in 1943 he was dismissed from his job and in 1950 was arrested and imprisoned, thereafter being sent to the Gulag, where he was tortured. Released in 1954 suffering from a heart condition he was to die soon after in 1958.
This disc of his orchestral music charts the musical threads and preoccupations that ran through his life. The Dances and Songs of the Ghetto was written in 1927 and published two years later. Premiered by Scherchen it was also, apparently, performed by Debrowen and Toscanini; prestigious interpreters. It’s an evocative work, with vivid rhythmic impetus and March themes, cleverly orchestrated. He writes well for brass and percussion and varies the speed and intensity of the individual dances, his slow ones full of melancholy with roles for solo strings.
In 1932 he wrote the Song of Mourning, the first of the two Symphonic Songs – they were paired in 1959, the year after Veprik’s death. Scherchen premiered this one too and it was later taken up by Mitropoulos. Modal, expressive, movingly intense it’s a more cosmopolitan opus than the earlier Op.12, undoubtedly for reasons of expediency. Jewish organisations had been brutally suppressed and Veprik shows here and in the Song of Joy, the companion piece from 1935 – bristly and confident – that he could present a folkloristic front. He had to change the title of his 1930 Op.17 from Orchestral Suite on Jewish Themes to Five Small Pieces for Orchestra. These brief bracing pieces are clearly folk-based and have tell-tale elements, such as a clarinet bridge and a cadenza, that point to vestiges of Jewish elements in the music.
In 1946 he composed the Pastorale, which seems to rebel against its title. There’s a profound introversion and melancholy in this lightly scored 11-minute piece made the more explicable when one reads that the movement was a revision and largely based on the second slow movement of his Symphony No.2, composed in 1938. Precisely plotted there’s nothing extraneous about Veprik’s writing; it’s a distillation of experience. The final example of his orchestral music in the disc is the Two Poems for Orchestra, which again take much from the Second Symphony. Martial rhythms propel the first poem with percussion and brass adding tense urgency. High winds coil and the music is saturated in foreboding. Its companion shares a similar 13-14 minute span. The second poem, however, is even more pessimistic than the first – its harmonies can be wrenching and there is a baleful accumulation of incident before a strangely confident fanfare announces the appearance of something altogether – seemingly – more tender and innocent. And then a confident end.
The two poems, however much they may owe to the Second Symphony are clearly independent pieces that speak their own language and project their own uneasy sense of self. This late diptych, completed after he was released from the Gulag, broken in health but not in spirit, is a testament to his sense of perseverance and to the preservation of his own musical ideals.
I’m greatly indebted to booklet notes for much detail; Jascha Nemtsov, Inna Klause and conductor Christoph-Mathias Mueller’s thoughts add significantly to one’s appreciation of Veprik’s dilemmas. Mueller conducts the BBC NOW with vivid intensity and the recording captures both the generosity and the melancholy span of Veprik’s music with fidelity.
Jonathan Woolf
Previous review: Stephen Greenbank
