American Record Guide

The mini-renaissance of Vyacheslav Artyomov’s music continues. This Russian composer, born in 1940, endured oppression in the early 1980s after the odious Tikhon Khrennikov lambasted him and six other composers in 1979. Melodiya did record some of his music as early as 1984, and Divine Art has been reissuing those along with recordings from his personal archives. We’ve generally been impressed with his vision while noting that passages can be cheap or cloying. Tone clusters, star-lit meditations, religious ecstasy, jazz, and even silly humor all figure in his strange, powerful, and sometimes frustrating music. Like a planet’s unavoidable gravitational pull, his compositions have often drawn us in.

Most of these pieces are consistently dreamlike, with the unmetered, distant-galaxy writing enhanced by cool, reverberant sonics. Artyomov demands all your concentration, so two or three pieces is usually enough for one sitting. The full string chords in Romantic Capriccio (in memory of Sibelius) offer a brief respite, but by the time Morning Songs (Mattinate) rolls around, I’m ready for some Haydn.

The one outlier, Scenes, was written in 1971 for a ballet film that was banned after one of the dancers defected. The faster sections are cheeky, peppy, and reminiscent of Stravinsky’s ‘Ragtime’; jazz and spoofed sentimentality appear in the slower parts. The sound is not ideal, but it is clear and listenable, though the piano in a few pieces is shallow and bright, and the violin in Scenes is put under a particularly glaring light. Notes and texts are in English and Russian.

—Stephen Estep