Baroque or Classical Russian Composers?
Gary Morrison
afternoon: I can't immediately think of any "great" Russian composers
earlier than the mid-late Romantic period. Can you?
"Great" of course is all relative. I have no doubt that, as in any time
and place, there have been capable composers throughout Russia's
history, but are there any Russian equivalents of, say, JS Bach,
Telemann, Vivaldi, Haydn, Mozart, Rossini, or Beethoven?
Doing a quick Google search, I came upon this:
http://www.amazon.com/Russian-Baroque-Nikolai-Petuchov/dp/B000005IEQ
which struck me as interesting. However, most of the composers' names
there don't strike me as terribly Russian-sounding.
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Steven Bornfeld
> A curious thought popped into my mind out of the blue Thursday
> afternoon: I can't immediately think of any "great" Russian composers
> earlier than the mid-late Romantic period. Can you?
>
> "Great" of course is all relative. I have no doubt that, as in any time
> and place, there have been capable composers throughout Russia's
> history, but are there any Russian equivalents of, say, JS Bach,
> Telemann, Vivaldi, Haydn, Mozart, Rossini, or Beethoven?
>
> Doing a quick Google search, I came upon this:
>
> http://www.amazon.com/Russian-Baroque-Nikolai-Petuchov/dp/B000005IEQ
>
> which struck me as interesting. However, most of the composers' names
> there don't strike me as terribly Russian-sounding.
>
I doubt there was anyone of nearly that stature before Glinka, even
within the country. Maybe the vast size of the empire had something to
do with it; in any case there is a certain publisher of guitar music in
Ohio that says (probably with some justification) that even more
recently Russian composers don't get their due in the rest of the
western world.
http://www.editionsorphee.com/_vti_bin/shtml.exe/index.htm
Steve
Gary Morrison
Interesting.
From what I can recall of Russia's history around that time, it was ...
pretty turbulent. That may have made it difficult to create a climate
for royalty to sponsor composers.
Arno Schuh
> "Great" of course is all relative. I have no doubt that, as in any
> time and place, there have been capable composers throughout Russia's
> history, but are there any Russian equivalents of, say, JS Bach,
> Telemann, Vivaldi, Haydn, Mozart, Rossini, or Beethoven?
AfaIk. in the Russian orthodox mass no instruments are alowed. So it would
be hard to bring up such a composer like Bach.
In addition, the Russian court prefered Italian, German etc. music and
musicians and disdained their own ones.
However, there maid be a lot of music - in Italian, German, French style of
course, composed by Russian composers - that still sleeps in the archives
and waiting for a kiss. :-)
liley
The most famous Russian composers of the 18th century are Maxim
Berezovsky, Dmitry Bortnyansky, Yevstigney Fomin, Anton Tietz. Pratum
Integrum orchestra play their music:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/105-9589792-1544467?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=pratum+integrum&x=0&y=0
Fomin's opera "Orfeo" is widely known in Russia:
http://www.amazon.com/Orfeo-Ed-Euridice-Fomin/dp/B00005JT5C/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1212330757&sr=1-4