Available at last! By special arrangement with Olympia Records, Alto is pleased to announce the resumption of one of the most sought-sfter CD series in recent years: the complete orchestral music of the prolific Nikolai Yakovlevich Myaskovsky. Myaskovsky occupies a unique position in recent music history: his orchestral output is one of the largest since Mozart and Haydn. He wrote 27 symphonies, composed over a period of more than 40 years – an output which he continued to produce even when, like many of his Soviet colleagues, he was severely criticized by the Communist Party despite his prominence and popularity. His music was never avant-garde in the Western sense of the term, but did, however, combine the Russian traditions with harmonic and formal characteristics of a newer era, achieving an outstanding artistic quality in terms both of its epic proportions and its fine detailing. Apart from the symphonies, Myaskovsky wrote a dozen or so symphonic works in other genres as well as solo concertos, chamber music (13 string quartets), more than 100 piano works and about 100 songs, music for military band and several cantatas: all in all, a catalogue of works that is as colourful as it is extensive.
After the collapse of the Soviet union, the multitalented Russian maestro Yevgeny Svetlanov (b. 1930) undertook a formidable project: recording the complete orchestral music with the orchestra he had led for nearly three decades, the Russian Federation Academic Symphony Orchestra (previously known as the USSR State Symphony Orchestra). The recordings were made in the early 1990s in a partnership between Svetlanov and the UK’s Olympia Records, and the first tem volumes have been hailed as an extraordinary addition to the discography, introducing this enormously interesting and accessible music to a worldwide audience.
