BORIS TISHCHENKO (1939-2010): Symphony No. 8 (World Premiere Recording), Concerto for Violin, Piano and String Orchestra, 3 Songs to Poems of Marina Tsvetayeva (arr. Leonid Rezetdinov [b.1961]).

Catalogue Number: 12S009
Label: Naxos
Reference: 8.573343
Format: CD
Price: $11.98
Description: The 8th Symphony is a late work - Tishchenko's last completed symphony in fact, as he failed to outrun the 9th Symphony Curse - and was intended as a companion piece to Schubert's 8th. This apparently imposed a degree of restraint on the composer in terms of dimensions, orchestration and style. There is little of the extravagant lunacy of the Dante symphony cycle in evidence here, for example. The piece is very much a reminiscence of Tishchenko's most explicitly Shostakovich-influenced style; in fact it's tempting to suggest that had Shostakovich attempted the same project, say, around the time of his 9th Symphony, the result might well have sounded very like this. All the material is Tishchenko's, but ingeniously he fits it into a template borrowed from Schubert, with clear allusions to Schubert's style so you're never left in doubt as to which episode of the Unfinished he's referring to. And Tishchenko's symphony has an exuberant finale, ending in a blaze of B major, as Schubert's presumably would have done. The double concerto of 2006 (offered back in 2008 - 01J078) is a fine example of Tishchenko at his most distinctive - which is to say, unashamedly and unavoidably following the tradition of his illustrious teacher, Shostakovich while incorporating sufficient modernistic elements to exert a degree of freedom from that tradition and establish himself as a member of the following generation. The three short songs (1970), in a chamber orchestra arrangement from 2014 blend popular song with the traditional Russian romance. Transliterated Russian-English texts. Mila Shkitil (mezzo), Chingiz Osmanov (violin), Nikolai Mazhara (piano), St. Petersburg State Symphony Orchestra; Yuri Serov.