Since the appearance on CD of Kancheli's Third, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Symphonies (9/90, 4/91) his music has begun to make headway in concert, both in Germany, where he has been living recently, and in the UK. The Georgian Symphony Orchestra brought the Fifth Symphony with them on tour, the CBSO will be playing the same work in April of this year, and the Fourth Symphony was a big success for the BBC Symphony last October.
Without wishing to take anything away from Olympia, whose enterprise continues to do immense credit to the record scene, it has been startling for me to discover how much more exciting this music is live than on disc. Kancheli has the most extraordinary instinct for the spatial and timbral qualities of orchestral sound, and vivid though the Russian recordings are, they cannot do full justice to this.
This thought niggles at me as I wonder why the Seventh Symphony, Kancheli's latest from 1986, impresses me rather less than the previous four. It has many of the familiar collisions of extreme textures, of awe-inspiring cortege-like tuttis and solitary pulsations on flute or harpsichord. But this time Kancheli has pushed the post-Brucknerian-naive pole of his style a good deal further. Where previously he would come to the brink of a harmonic cliche and shy away, here he seems happy to accept the invitation. And if that brings to mind Schnittke and polystylisticism, the juxtapositions lack the gruesome irony of full-blown Gothic horror which make that kind of approach work. Still, time may lead me to regret this judgement; I would certainly like to hear the symphony in concert before insisting on it.
The First Symphony is by way of a late graduation piece—Kancheli was 33 when he completed it in 1967. The style is much indebted to Shostakovich, in particular recalling the latter's Fourth Symphony, then only recently rehabilitated, but there is also a foretaste in the second movement of the mystical-apocalyptic tone which was soon to become Kancheli's hallmark.
More striking than either symphony though is Mourned by the Wind, one of the very few pieces of music composed in memory of a musicologist—Kancheli's fellow-Georgian and a figure well known to Shostakovich scholars, Givi Ordzhonikidze. Here is another example of Kancheli's special gift for finding pathos in the simplest of musical materials, with the solo viola's unearthly keening set against waterfalls of passionate declamation for the full orchestra. In its starkness and haunting spirituality this should appeal to those who respond to Part, Gorecki or Tavener—and perhaps even more so to listeners who find those composers a little too glamorous in their asceticism, so to speak, and who prefer to meet the music half way, rather than merely submitting to its spell.
The Olympia disc is self-recommending to anyone who has enjoyed the previous two Kancheli issues. All the performances are dedicated and confident, and recording quality is sound, though I suspect that the engineers have hyped up the violist with reverberation. On the ECM disc Kim Kashkashian's performance of the Liturgy is every bit as fine and rather more realistically recorded and her account of the Schnittke Concerto is magnificent. Having said that, Bashmet on RCA has an even wider range of tone-colour and characterization; his Schnittke is a performance of quite staggering command and insight. But if that all means that the ECM disc is squeezed out of contention it would be a great pity, not least because it comes with an outstandingly thoughtful booklet essay from Wilfrid Mellers. It may be worth adding that Bashmet is the dedicatee of the Kancheli Liturgy, and that his Melodiya recording of it with the Georgian Symphony Orchestra and Kakhidze (not generally available in the UK) is finer than either of its CD rivals. I very much hope that RCA have a new Bashmet recording in mind for the near future.'