Gliere's ballet suite and Knipper's symphony might not appear to have much in common but their coupling is an inspiration on Olympia's part. The works are near contemporaries (the suite is from 1927, the symphony from 1932), they each include a 'smash-hit' tune, and they each provided a model for approved Socialist Realist practice (and thus a handy stick with which to beat Shostakovich and Prokofiev in the later 1930s). Since the majority of such pieces were of a banality too embarrassing even for Russian record-producers, the value of this CD is all the greater.
The Red Poppy Suite is relatively well known in the West, principally for the ''Sailor's Dance'' (which Shostakovich may well have been satirizing in Boris Timofeevich's music in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk). The remainder of the score has little in it which would have surprised Delibes or Tchaikovsky, but it is undeniably vivid each neatly packaged idea readily suggests its own choreography. The playing is as idiomatic as you would expect from the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra; wiry string tone can probably be put down to a 25-year-old recording which also indulges in much boosting of solo instruments.
Judged by the usual standards Knipper's Fourth Symphony is a fairly ramshackle affair; but it should be remembered that it was aiming for a wider audience than western symphonists ever dream of. The song ''Little Field'', also known as ''Meadowland'', which portrays the ''Komsomol Fighter'' himself, achieved genuine popularity. The bright optimistic finale, apparently inspired by crowds greeting a Red Army regiment, was the sort of thing which gave Shostakovich the screaming ab-dabs, and in the days when it was still safe to do such things he said so. On the other hand there were enough shadows of Knipper's earlier cosmopolitanism to deprive the symphony of the mass impact to which it aspired; the song-symphony, the genre he so enthusiastically promoted, soon fell into disuse.
Arguably it is the stylistic discrepancies which give the Fourth Symphony its continuing fascination. These are nowhere near so marked as in Shostakovich's Second Symphony (To October), but they do include an adventurous tonal scheme, progressing from F minor to C major (where does Olympia's sleeve-information get D major from, I wonder?). Knipper may have leant rather too heavily on Tchaikovsky (the Romeo and Juliet Overture in his first movement development section) and Prokofiev (the Classical Symphony in the finale), but he was no mere hack, as the extended contrapuntal episodes prove. The bright, confident performance is no less than the music deserves.
Knipper was a survivor. Highly enough thought of to represent the Soviet Union at the 1931 ISCM Festival in Oxford, he was also one of the few with the courage to speak in Shostakovich's defence in 1936. And to judge from the Sinfonietta for Strings of 1953 he was as quick as anyone to sense the new possibilities of the post-Stalin era.
String orchestra pieces are generally associated more with Anglo-French neo-classicism than with the Soviets, and indeed there is more than a hint of Roussel/Berkeley/Britten urbanity alongside the more predictable moments of Slavonic angst. Perhaps the closest kindred spirit is Honegger (who has generally been more highly rated in the Soviet Union than elsewhere). Not all the ideas are as strong as the lithe fugal writing of the outer movements; some are indeed decidedly half-Boulangered. The Sinfonietta is thus more profound than its title would suggest, more advanced in style than its date and provenance would lead one to believe, but too diffuse in structure to have any strong claim to repertoire status. The Concert Poem, composed in 1971 (three years before Knipper's death), is rather less effective, its loose assembly of chorales and cadenzas around a central warlike episode suggesting a certain disorientation within the freer cultural climate.
Thanks to Olympia's initiative, Miaskovsky is now as strongly represented in the CD catalogue as Khachaturian—a remarkable state of affairs, but by no means incommensurate with their significance in the history of Soviet music. The Seventh Symphony of 1922 is one of the more adventurous in the Miaskovsky canon of 27, inaugurating a phase in which disruptive silences and dissonant conclusions were favoured devices. It opens with an enriched dominant harmony which is pure Scriabin, but equally important influences emanate from Franck and Grieg. The resulting style suffers from creeping chromaticism—a chronic disease of the inner parts—and squareness of phrasing and structural distension are additional drawbacks. On the other hand some of the ideas themselves have real quality and the overall structure is interesting a textbook sonata first movement, a slow movement encasing scherzo, fashioned after the example of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov concertos, and a recapitulatory finale which disintegrates prematurely.
An intriguing, if hardly convincing work, then, performed with a considerable dramatic sweep to compensate for sour woodwind tone, some sketchy string playing and an adenoidal horn. The late-1970s recording quality is again mixed and there are some peculiarities of balance and editing, plus curdled string-tone and cut-off resonance in the Knipper pieces. Olympia's presentation is again skimpy. The structure of the Miaskovsky symphony is misrepresented, the tonal axes of the Knipper Sinfonietta are described as D flat and F instead of C and E (though the general tone of the comments is perceptive), and minaccioso, the most important designation in the Miaskovsky, is given as minassimo, a misprint taken over from the Melodiya original.
Miaskovsky collectors will have to have the Marco Polo disc as well. They will acquire a less passionate account of the Seventh Symphony in the process (and one only marginally more refined in terms of orchestral playing and recording). But they will need it for the sake of the tumultuous Tenth Symphony. This work, not otherwise available on record, is accurately described in Soviet sources as ''an individualistic concept of pessimism realized through expressionistic images''. It is also realized through a highly chromaticized F minor tonality, reminiscent at times of early Schoenberg, and a genuine single-movement structure, with an ABA 'slow movement' embedded between exposition and development.
This is a piece which Persimfans, the famous experimental conductorless orchestra, premiered in March 1928, with unhappy results which may have had something to do with Miaskovsky's subsequent stylistic retrenchment. It sorts out the Slovak Philharmonic, too, and it may be that there is a finer Russian performance waiting in the wings. Until such time, however, this is a more than useful stopgap.'