TIMELINE:
Gliere Prelude no. 18 in G-sharp minor: 0:00
Lyatoshinksy, Mourning Prelude: 1:38
Bortkiewicz, Lamentation in E-flat minor: 7:09
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Gliere's 18th Prelude in G sharp minor
Reinhold Moritzevich Glière was a Russian Imperial and Soviet composer who's one of a handful of masters who produced preludes in all the major and minor keys. The iconic examples of such collections include those of Johann Sebastian Bach, Rachmaninoff, Blumenfeld, Chopin, Czerny and others.
Most of Gliere’s piano works pose substantial difficulties; the G-sharp minor prelude is no exception. Given his extraordinary life journey as well as his compositions, it is a wonder Glière does not enjoy renown. Fortunately, all his music has been recorded by top-tier artists.
He was born (30 December 1874) in the city of Kiev, Russian Empire (now Kyiv, Ukraine). He was the second son of the wind instrument maker Ernst Moritz Glier (1834–1896) who emigrated to the Russian Empire and married Józefa (Josephine) Korczak (1849–1935), the daughter of his master, from Warsaw.
He entered the Kiev school of music in 1891, where he was taught violin by Otakar Ševčík, among others. In 1894 Glière entered the Moscow Conservatory where he studied with heavyweights such as Sergei Taneyev (counterpoint), Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov (composition), Jan Hřímalý (violin), Anton Arensky and Georgi Conus (both harmony).
He graduated in 1900, having composed a one-act opera Earth and Heaven (after Lord Byron), and received a gold medal in composition. Glière then joined the faculty at the Moscow Gnesin School of Music, where his students included Nikolai Myaskovsky and Sergei Prokofiev.
After 1917 Glière never visited Western Europe, as many other Russian composers did. He gave concerts in Siberia and other remote areas of Russia instead. From 1938 to 1948, Glière was Chairman of the Organization Committee of the Soviet Composers Association.
He died in Moscow on 23 June 1956.
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Lyatoshinsky's Mourning Prelude (also referred to as the "Tragic", or "Elegy", Prelude) was the composer's virgin foray into piano composition!
Boris Lyatoshinsky (1895 -1968), a Ukrainian composer, conductor and academic, was a highly influential figure in Ukrainian music, won widespread recognition in the USSR by the end of his life, and was dubbed the “father of modern Ukrainian music”.
Lyatoshinksy was born and raised in Zhytomyr, in northwestern Ukraine. Then he went to Kiev in 1914 and enrolled in Kiev University to study law as well as the Kiev Conservatory, where he studied composition with Reinhold Gliere; they became lifelong friends.
Lyatoshinksy graduated from the law school in 1918, and from the Conservatory in 1919 - where he taught for the rest of his life. From 1935 to 1938 and 1941 to 1944, Lyatoshinksy was a faculty member at the Moscow Conservatory as well, without leaving his post in Kiev.
Lyatoshynsky’s earliest music was Romantic, but written in a modern style, experimenting with atonality, drawing on Slavic and Ukrainian folk themes, and deriving inspiration from European composers as well as Alexander Scriabin.
Lyatoshinksy was awarded two Stalin prizes: one for his Ukrainian Quintet in 1946, and the second for the 1952 score of a movie about the 19th Century Ukrainian poet, Taras Shevtshenko. Following his death in 1968, he was posthumously named a People’s Artist of the Ukrainian SSR.
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Bortkiewicz's Lamentation in E flat minor
Sergei Bortkiewicz (pronounced bor' kay vich) (1877-1952) is amongst a stellar group of 20th century composer-pianists who never realized deserved world renown. (Others include Felix Blumenfeld, Leopold Godowsky, Nikolai Medtner, Alexander Siloti and Alexei Stanchinsky). Born in present day Ukraine and educated at the Imperial Conservatory in St. Petersburg as well as Germany's Leipzig Conservatory, Bortkiewicz survived both World Wars and the Russian Revolution.
Many original manuscripts were repeatedly lost when his homes were destroyed in war. This caused him chronic depression, during which he found the wherewithal to rewrite well over 100 compositions, including several piano concertos. His musical corpus was not forgotten; in the last few decades his works have appeared in recital and concert programs worldwide, and all of it has been recorded by top-tier artists.
Bortkiewicz’s Romantic melodicist style is similar to that of his legendary contemporary, Sergei Rachmaninov: it is brooding, melancholy, provocative, challenging – and even enchanting. This Lamentation is a stunning sample of his compositional treasures.
In a 1948 interview, he said, “Romanticism is not the bloodless intellectual commitment to a program, but the expression of my most profound mind and soul.”
His was a gifted mind and beautiful soul, indeed.
