Glière String Octet

 Day 111

Glière String Octet

Berlin Philharmonic String Octet

After several, very pleasant, days of the Strauss family time to change direction. So for the next few days I am going to be exploring more chamber music, this time from Russian and Eastern Europe. I know a few of the more famous pieces in this repertory but generally this is not an area which I have explored very much.  This Octet, my starting point, was suggested by our splendid principal cellist Anthony Desbrulais. My knowledge of Glière is very slight. I did one of his shorter piano pieces for a grade exam at school and I knew the Russian Sailor's Dance. I think that as one time I heard the concerto for Coloratura soprano and orchestra but that's about it.

I was expecting a piece of brightly coloured Soviet style propaganda but this was very different. It is an early piece (written as a student and completed in 1902 when he was in his mid twenties) and is in what was for the time a rather conservative idiom. Heard cold one might have attributed it to Borodin but with occasional overtones of Dvořák and Tchaikovsky - it is certainly in the romantic tradition. I enjoyed it immensely and was very impressed with the melodic freshness and the attractive part writing. Glière handles the 8 instruments well and there are only a few passages where one feels he was thickening out the texture to give everybody something to play. Perhaps the second movement is the highlight - a scherzando movement (though not a particularly fast one) with folk song overtones and some unexpected rhythmic twist.

Glière lived on to the age of 80, well into the Soviet era but seems to have escaped the attentions of the Russian authorities , unlike Shostakovich and others, and was left alone to write increasingly anachronistic colourful pieces celebrating Russian life.  But this piece shows that there is more to him that the conformist hack that I had taken him to be.