After the synthetic doodlings of Karayev’s Seven Beauties ballet music (Olympia, 12/95), it’s a pleasure to welcome a ballet score – this time complete – from another Azeri composer who really knows his native mind. If you feel most comfortable with the Khachaturian-style fusion of classical western and ethnic eastern styles, then you may find Amirov disconcerting. For The Arabian Nights, he uses a large symphony orchestra, but the material he gives it is nearly all based on Caucasian phrases and oriental modes. The necessary repetition that entails and the generally high dynamic levels remain companionable thanks to a remarkably fine collaboration between the veteran Baku-born conductor Nazim Rzaev and a Bolshoi orchestra on peak form (the recording was made in 1982, just before the orchestra’s rapid post-Glasnost decline).
With vivid Caucasian tongs, bones and wild percussion very much centre-stage – not to mention the occasional lute-like thrumming (whether from balalaika or tar or both, the impossibility of finding a score leaves me unable to be precise) – the First Act’s unflinchingly barbaric musical telling of luxuriant infidelity and uxoricide holds one luridly in thrall through the whole of its 40-minute span. The second, when Scheherazade takes over to prevent her execution by telling tales – here, a mere three compared to the legendary 1,001 – loses focus a little, for Amirov is no fluent tone-poet when it comes to the stories of Sinbad and the Roc, Aladdin and Ali-Baba. Yes, occasionally it does sound like “Rajah Bimmy’s harum-scarum … where you see the pretty girl pick the handkerchief up with her teeth” from On the Town, but then Bernstein’s pastiche of eastern promise is spot-on in the first place and Amirov remains true to his Azeri principles: local colour properly absorbed really is a substitute for the outsider’s poetic fantasy of the east.
Amirov’s range is generously showcased by the remainder of the second CD. Given the relative dearth of repertoire, string orchestras should not ignore the 1947 Symphony, celebrating Azerbaijan’s national hero, the poet Nizami, with a mixture of passionate refrains and a keen balance between western and Caucasian melodies. Rozhdestvensky in 1964 drove the Azerbaijan Symphony’s strings to exuberant effect; the sound, even with the resonant acoustic over-generous in its support, is far from thin or scrappy, though surely the featherlight return of the slow movement theme needs more delicate fantasy.
Shur proves the most difficult work of the three to like, but again Amirov carries out his self-appointed brief admirably: to follow the native form of the mugam, with its variations and improvisations on a narrow-intervalled theme, in symphonic terms. To western ears, such rigour breeds a certain monotony; but the passionate unison recitatives, the woodwind adornments of dance-melodies and the suggestive slides between notes all capture the essence of a tradition. The third conductor on the set, Rauf Abdullayev, can’t quite match the searing intensity of Rzaev, and his orchestra is less precise, but here, too, the integrity and involvement are obvious.'