ALEXANDER MOSOLOV (1900-1973): Symphony No. 5, Harp Concerto.

Description: Mosolov was one of the foremost composers of the Russian avant-garde during the1920s. His music was considered ‘a testament to the revolutionary spirit of his time’, but the legacy of his fame from that period now rests solely on Iron Foundry. Soviet-era politics brought persecution and imprisonment, and these two recently rediscovered works were both composed after his ‘rehabilitation’. The Harp Concerto – a piece worthy of a place in the mainstream repertoire – is Mosolov’s ‘response’ to the 1938 concerto by his teacher Glière, and is heard here in its first complete performance. By 1939, when he wrote it, his style had been irreversibly “corrected” by his experiences in a labor camp and it is an example of Mosolov’s obediently pliant style of composition from this period. Three of its movements were first performed in 1939 at the Moscow Conservatoire with Vera Dulova as the soloist, but the manuscript score and parts were subsequently consigned to oblivion before being rediscovered and restored for performance by the conductor of this recording, Arthur Arnold. In the first half of the 1960s, Mosolov largely busied himself in writing uplifting patriotic potboilers with titles such as Hello, New Harvest and Glory to Moscow, but he also managed to produce a handful of more enduring works for his desk drawer. These include the fifth symphony, which was never performed in his lifetime and remained unpublished until 1991. Its colorful, if uncontroversial, scoring makes it an enjoyably fascinating addition to the corpus of neglected Soviet-era symphonies now seeing the light of day for the first time. These are fascinating additions to the corpus of neglected Soviet-era works. Taylor Ann Fleshman (harp), Moscow Symphony Orchestra; Arthur Arnold.