Mihkel LÜDIG (1880-1958)
Overture-Fantasy No.1 in B minor (1906) [6:48]
Overture-Fantasy No.2 in B minor (1945) [8:47]
Midsummer Night: symphonic scene (1910) [6:27]
Artur LEMBA (1885-1963)
Piano Concerto No.1 in G major (1905 rev.1910) [21:59]
Artur KAPP (1878-1952)
The Last Confession (1905) orch. Charles Coleman (b.1968) [6:08]
Symphony No.4 ‘Youth Symphony’ (1948) [22:54]
Triin Ruubel (violin), Mihkel Poll (piano), Estonian National Symphony Orchestra / Neeme Järvi
rec. 2017-2018, Estonia Concert Hall, Tallinn
CHANDOS CHAN20150 [73:23]
Rooted in the traditions of the powerhouse St Petersburg Conservatory, Estonian symphonic music slowly developed its own character, an observation reflected in a number of the works in this disc. The three composers represented were born within a seven year period between 1878 and 1885 and were in the vanguard of the rise of Estonian symphonic writing. As one would expect, Neeme Järvi hasn’t overlooked the music of his native soil – with the Royal Scottish National, for example, he recorded a two-disc recording called ‘Music from Twentieth-Century Estonia’ (CHAN 241-26). Now with the forces of the Estonian National Symphony he turns to Mihkel Lüdig, Artur Lemba and Artur Kapp.
Lüdig, rector of the Tallinn Higher Music School – later Tallinn Conservatory - is represented by two of his Overture-Fantasies, written nearly forty years apart, and by his ‘symphonic scene’ Midsummer Night. The first Overture-Fantasy (1906) is a confident, probing piece with a pert folk tune quotation on the solo flute. It does sound rather episodic, and ends abruptly. The 1945 Overture-Fantasy No.2 manages to embody both lyric and March themes and is again breezy but this time with a rather noble theme (the Andante section), some dappled pizzicati and a brief violin solo. In 1910 he wrote Midsummer Night, a Summer Solstice piece, with misterioso impressionist elements and engaging atmospherics. In time these give way to punchier writing that looks forward to the later Overture-Fantasy though here with a sublimated Wagnerian admixture.
Artur Lemba enjoyed a more extrovert profile than Lüdig. He graduated from the St Petersburg Conservatory with distinctions in both piano and composition and was clearly something of a virtuoso, later serving as professor of the instrument in Tallinn. His First Piano Concerto, conceived as a vehicle for his own pianism, was written in 1905, premiered in St Petersburg in 1908, then revised two years later, in which version we hear it. An early work, it has the briefest of orchestral introductions before the soloist rips in with a kind of Anton Rubinstein-Tchaikovsky bravura, and just a hint of Rachmaninov in places. Folkloric too at points, it makes a bold appeal for populism but its first movement is not as appealing as the Grieg-like orchestral writing in the central slow movement - short at not quite five minutes. The finale reverts to the confidently bombastic writing of the first movement though the winds here take on Griegian allure at moments, the music accelerating joyfully, if none too complexly, to the finishing line.
Artur Kapp’s The Last Confession sounds like a precursor to Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. Written in 1905 it’s heard in the orchestration made in the 1990s by Charles Coleman. With its air of piety, employing a Lutheran Chorale and a role for solo violin, it has a rather Renaissance feel, with the strings delicate and rarefied. Forty years later, in 1948, the disenchanted Kapp wrote Symphony No.4, subtitled the ‘Youth Symphony’, which he dedicated to the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League on its 30th anniversary. Estonia was now in the firm embrace of the Soviet Union as a ‘soviet socialist republic’ and the symphony won a Stalin Prize in 1950; in other categories winners included Glière and Shostakovich. Tubin had already written his first five symphonies by 1945 and Kapp’s Fourth sounds like a work of nostalgia, optimistic and even when solemn – as in the opening theme of the slow movement – soon reverting to comforting precedent; Glazunov and Tchaikovsky loom large in the ensuing variations. The slow movement itself is songfully warm and skirts all angst; it’s also exceptionally brief, almost an afterthought, before the folksy finale, couched in late-Romantic vernacular, but with hints of jaunty Orchestral Marches in places.
The recording quality and playing alike are excellent. Despite obvious felicities – usually when the music is at its most reflective – and for all his labours, Järvi can’t convince me that these works are anything truly special. They shine light on one lineage of Estonian music and have to be seen as trying to pioneer independence for the country’s music but all the while, I have to be honest, I yearned for a few bars of Tubin’s grit.
Jonathan Woolf
