Olga Solovieva, Anton Prischepa, Yana Ivanilova - Boris Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto, Clarinet Concerto, Signs of the Zodiac (2006)

Thanks to the lively efforts of the Moscow-based Boris Tchaikovsky Society, we are building up a rounded picture of this important figure in Soviet music (no relation to Pyotr Ilyich). New to CD is the Piano Concerto of 1971, an arresting way in to the composer’s unpredictable musical language with its hammering toccata and the synthetic melodies of its second movement. Olga Solovieva, who has already recorded Boris Tchaikovsky’s solo piano music, keeps the work’s more aggressive side focused and clean. Anton Prischepa is a mellow soloist in the lyric interlude offered by the Clarinet Concerto – not quite as simple as it seems when trumpets join the outer movements. The best comes last with Signs of the Zodiac, highly sensitive treatments of four great Russian poems moving from idiosyncratic thoughts on death and burial to a childlike dreamscape. Soprano Yanna Ivanilova is lighter and clearer than Margarita Miroshnikova in a distinguished disc conducted by Edward Serov (Northern Flowers), even if she falls shorter of the climactic intensity in the central setting of Marina Tsvetaeva. Strings sound undernourished in the first two works, rather unnaturally lit in the cantata; but the drive and integrity of the performances are never in doubt.