One of the benefits that has come with the influx of Russian conductors in the West, especially in Britain, is the assortment of music they have brought with them, music that may have had some fame in Russia but has been unknown in the West. Consider the music of Vladimir Martynov, here championed by Vladimir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir. Martynov started out in the 1960s as a serialist and passed through phases of interest in electronic music, rock, and ethnic music from the Soviet republics ...
Read More
One of the benefits that has come with the influx of Russian conductors in the West, especially in Britain, is the assortment of music they have brought with them, music that may have had some fame in Russia but has been unknown in the West. Consider the music of Vladimir Martynov, here championed by Vladimir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir. Martynov started out in the 1960s as a serialist and passed through phases of interest in electronic music, rock, and ethnic music from the Soviet republics before forming his own entirely distinctive take, often religious, on the minimalist influences coming from the Baltics and the U.S. Here, his is not the meditative minimalism of Arvo Pärt but a rather splashy kind with Romantic aspects including a prominent quotation from Schumann's Kinderszenen, Op. 15, jazzy interludes, handclaps, and an orientation toward exoticism (underlined by the specific Schumann quote, from Von fremden Ländern und Menschen). The original version of Utopia,...
Read Less
