Songs

The presented recording combines two of sustainably impressing species of the development of the (art) song of the 19th century: the lyrical romance appealing with it's melodic cantability and the dramatic-expressive, mostly strikingly rhythmic ballade, which gains full effect by it's underlying words. It is quite interesting how Mussorgsky is characteristically enlarging the romance-type song in his early creative period before "Boris Godunov" within only six years. 1858, with less than twenty years he set A. Pleshchev's "The leaves were sadly rustling" to music (see [9] as the earliest of the presented songs) completely in the style of the traditional song-like romance, as it has been established by M. Glinka and A. Dargomizhsky as a kind of synthesis between western-romantic, especially Italian art song and the early Russian folksong tradition in the musical drawing-rooms of St. Petersburg and Moscow. Six years later Mussorgsky is developing this traditional musical spectrum of forms and expressions in a real revolutionary way with his composition of Pushkin's "Night" (see [12] as the latest piece in the group of songs "before Boris"), by adapting the song line to the typical Russian language melody and by dissolving thus for example the musical formal forces of a permanent beat-bound measure. The innovative power of Mussorgsky was opening new possibilities and is shown very distinctly in this example, when considering the independent role of the piano, it's harmonics reaching to the limits of diatonic and the shade of the expression achieved by this. It is no wonder, that composers from Debussy to Janácek and (of course!) Shostakovich have intensively studied Mussorgsky's endeavours to seize idiomatical language melody with means of music and have adapted them to their respective language-cultural context.

Number of Discs: 1

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