AS I left the Royal Concert Hall after the RSNO’s regular weekly concert last Saturday night, I overheard three different strands of conversation emerging from the crowds milling about on the pavement in Glasgow's Killermont Street. All the strands related to the concert that had just finished. The stunning pianist Nikolai Lugansky, who had given blazing performances of Prokofiev’s First and Fifth Concertos, was a major figure in the chat. No surprise there, and he’s back in the Royal Concert Hall tonight to complete his cycle of Prokofiev’s concertos with the brilliantly-entertaining Third Piano Concerto, the most popular of the Russian composer’s concertos. Tonight he’ll be conducted by the mighty Finn, as I nicknamed John Storgards many years ago. And the pavement discussion also touched on the young Norwegian conductor of a week ago who clearly appealed to as many folk as he did to me.
But what really caught my ear was the number of people who had been entranced by the magical evocative power of the lovely little opener, The Enchanted Lake by Russian composer Anatoli Lyadov. (There are numerous anglicised spellings of his name.) Everybody I heard and spoke to was struck by the beauty and stillness of his impressionistic evocation. Late into Saturday night, after my review was written, teased and tweaked into something fit for filing to The Herald on Sunday morning, I was haunted by Lyadov’s spellbinding piece, written in 1909, in which time appeared to have been suspended. Paul Griffiths, in his Penguin Companion to Classical Music, describes Lyadov as “a master magician of orchestral colour” and the beautiful essay, The Enchanted Lake, as “an extraordinary creation of dappled stillness”. Griffiths does qualify his assessment by saying that Lyadov was “creatively indolent”.
Whatever, today Lyadov is no more than a footnote in musical history. He’s a nowhere man. He didn’t write much music. He did some useful things, including getting Mikhail Glinka’s music into print, and some important conducting. He was also an editor, pianist and teacher at the conservatory, where one of his students was the young Prokofiev. He seemed to become associated with the nationalist school of Russian composers, based in St Petersburg. He was not directly a member of that group known variously as The Mighty Handful, the Kuchka, or The Five: that is, Borodin, Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky and the lesser figure of Cesar Cui. Lyadov never made the grade, though he clearly had immense potential. He’s also a man who missed the opportunity of a lifetime but probably wouldn’t have been bothered about it. I’ve never yet met a composer in the modern era that wasn’t fuelled by the need to write music and have it heard. It’s like a hunger, and it’s what drives many composers. They might be reticent in expressing their ambitions for themselves and their music, but it’s there somewhere, powering their drive to get their musical ideas into some sort of coherent form of thought, get them enshrined in print and get the damned stuff played: the acid test of whether it works and is any good.
I have a strong notion that, if I bumped into the shade of Anatoli Lyadov and put this lot to him, he would probably shrug his shoulders and say: “Not me, mate: you must be talking about somebody else.” He was a lazy man. He had plenty going for him in his private life: he acquired a wife, and along with her came a mansion and an estate. Maybe all those creature comforts displaced the need for expression that fuels the creative energy of so many conductors. Lyadov was undoubtedly gifted. Music was in his family and in his DNA. His dad was the conductor at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg. Other members of his family were also in the music business. He was trained at the St Petersburg Conservatory, though, critically perhaps, it did seem to be noted that, while he was there, he was not particularly assiduous. He seemed tormented by doubt, uncertainty and the fear of failure.
The never-ambiguous Grove Concise Dictionary of Music is, er, concise on the subject and nails Lyadov. “Procrastination, indolence and self-doubt prevented him from completing a work of any size or scope.” But Lyadov’s ultimate bloomer, which sealed his fate, came when he was commissioned by Diaghilev to write the music of The Firebird for the Ballets Russes. Lyadov didn’t do it. Diaghilev, frustrated and angered, removed the commission from Lyadov and gave it instead to a young, hungry and untried composer. His name was Igor Stravinsky. And we know where that led.
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