Myaskovsky and the return of esotericism

As much as I think I know about classical music I continue to be humbled by how much I don’t know. As we turn toward summer, the esoteric pick of the week is back on my radar and it brings with it a slew, nay, a legion of little known pieces of music.

We strayed from this exploratory device during what has been a busy and stellar concert season. The concert season is roughly October to June. That’s an arbitrary designation on my part, but it suits my designs so I’m going to use it.

Nikolai Myaskovsky wrote 27 symphonies. 27! I’d never heard of him until this week. The reason I’d not heard of him could be because he won the Stalin Prize five times. Myaskovsky started as a Russian composer and ended as a Soviet composer. He survived both wars but was a casualty of shell shock on the Austrian front during WWI.

Myaskovsky didn’t have the aura of resistance about him in the way that composers such as Shostakovich and Prokofiev portrayed. This might explain why he is relatively unknown in the West. He wasn’t a freedom fighter who was secretly on our side.

I’ve listened to his first and sixth symphonies and they are great music. I have intentions of listening to all 27, but these aren’t short symphonies. They are full-on post-romantic/20th-century expressions of the form.

For the official pick of the week, I’m going with Myaskovsky’s Symphony No. 22. The music has a melancholic quality and is missing the maniacal and false celebrations of Soviet composers such as Khachaturian, Kabalevsky, and the aforementioned Shostakovich and Prokofiev.

No. 22 feels like a true expression of Myaskovsky’s reticent personality, but that, of course, is committing the sin of "individualism," of which he was accused by the Soviet press.