Lyadov: Three tone poems

Day 316

Lyadov: Three tone poems

Baba Yaga

The Enchanted Lake

Kilamora

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Alexander Titov

Lyadov is best remembered as the composer whose inability to complete the score of The Firebird led the way to Stravinsky being commissioned in his place. There is a lovely anecdote that he turned up to Diaghilev three months after being commissioned saying “I’ve brought the manuscript paper….”. As Richard Taruskin explains in his superb book on Stravinsky (see day.  ) this is not actually true. Lyadov was agreed to write the music in the first place. He was certainly approached but never agreed to write a score. And the story about the manuscript paper is, unfortunately, almost certainly apocryphal.

It is certainly true that Lyadov was ultra self-critical and that his output wasn’t extensive. It seems that these three symphonic poems originally formed part of a plan for a massive opera but when Lyadov realised that he would never actually get round to completing he extracted these three short pieces.

You only have to hear a few notes to know that this is Russian music. Rimsky Korsakov is the obvious point of reference - ironically Lyadov was thrown out of Rimsky’s composition class because of a poor attendance record, though he was eventually let back in. The music is colourful and the orchestration shows all of the flair of a Rimsky pupil. Perhaps the most interesting of three pieces is the Enchanted Lake, which is a mood picture almost devoid of melody - the gentle undulations and constantly changing orchestral texture really do evoke a sense of the water ebbing and flowing. Here there were some traces of Debussy and elsewhere some hints that Stravinsky was also lurking in the wings.

So an enjoyable encounter with a composer whose music was completely unknown to me. Not one of the greats, but certainly well worth listening to.