KALINNIKOV KISS-OFF

posted by James Reel

    As my wife says, sometimes you need to go to work on Monday in order to recover from a weekend at home. For me, this past weekend included an all-morning hike in the Catalinas on Saturday; a visit from David Close, local host of Morning Edition on sister station KUAZ (he wanted to poke at an old, malfunctioning laserdisc player of mine); a trip out to the Gaslight Theatre for a review in this Thursday’s Tucson Weekly; participation in my monthly book group (which I helped organize long before book groups became middlebrow chic, I’ll have you know); and the usual domestic chores. I also had to put in a few hours proofreading some golf-review copy for a local publisher, even though I personally find golf to be dull and the spread of courses across the desert to be an ecological mistake, but that’s what happens when you’re an anything-for-a-buck freelancer. A good friend of mine—who is herself an excellent writer—told me Saturday that this was further evidence that she and I too often “cruise below our natural altitude.” This from someone who was once asked to ghost-write a book on the Cosmic Yoni.
    Anyway, I didn’t get much reading or listening done this weekend, and no cello practice at all. I did finish the last few pages of an eight-month-old New Yorker, while listening to two CDs I hadn’t heard in a while. One’s definitely a keeper: Nicholas McGegan and the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra with a pair of suites from stage works by Rameau, one of those rare composers who never seems to have had an off day. The other disc, though, I’ve finally decided after several years to dump onto the eBay pile: an orchestral miscellaney by Vassily Kalinnikov. Now, Kalinnikov was a greatly talented Russian composer of the generation following Tchaikovsky’s, but unlike Rameau he did suffer some off days. I’ve finally lost patience for the overtures and incidental music in question (on a Marco Polo disc), which are generic examples of cosmopolitan Russian Romanticism (as opposed to the Russian nationalism of Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky).
    His health undermined by chronic poverty, Kalinnikov died in his mid 30s; had he survived another couple of decades it’s quite likely he would have positioned himself as a first-rank composer, judging not from the pieces on that Marco Polo disc but from his two symphonies. They show the slight influence of Tchaikovsky (inspiration comes more from Tchaikovsky’s early symphonies than his heart-on-sleeve later works), and Kalinnikov was evidently closely familiar with the symphonies of Borodin and Balakirev. I learned these two wonderful works from the typically brash Svetlanov recordings that EMI licensed from Melodiya in the LP days, but a better-rounded view comes from Neeme Järvi on Chandos. My shelf space is tight, and I’m not sorry to see that Marco Polo disc go, but there’s no way I’ll relinquish those Kalinnikov symphonies.