Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov’s fame rests on a single work, actually a section of a single work, that being the brief Procession of the Sardar march from the Caucasian Sketches No. 1. Well, as the title would imply, there is a No. 2, Iveria, though in this case the music is not so melodically distinctive, or even interesting. The Armenian Rhapsody benefits from the inclusion of local color, especially in its “ethnic” violin solos. With “I wonder if it is misfortune”, from the 1899 opera Assya, we reach the high point of this collection. It’s a beautiful piece–engagingly sung by mezzo-soprano Vardouhi Khachaturian–whose beginning sounds like Grieg, then moves on to Mussorgsky.
The 1922 symphonic poem Mtsiri (after Lermontov) seems at first to be a rehash of a Rimsky-Korsakov opera suite, but redeems itself with the “song of the little fish” (in a lovely rendition by soprano Hasmik Hatsagortsian) in its central section. But look at the composition date for this, and the equally anachronistic Turkish Fragments of 1930, and you have to wonder if Ippolitov-Ivanov ever got a whiff of fresh air from outside the conservatory. (Then again, his 1933 Jubilee March was a hit with the Red Army, so why rock the boat with any of that modernist stuff?) In sum, this is a well-filled disc of basically second-rate Russian music played by an orchestra that has the same indifferent attitude toward intonation (the beginning of Iveria will make your skin crawl) as on conductor Loris Tjeknavorian’s earlier ASV disc of Rimsky-Korsakov suites. The overbright, flat-perspective recording doesn’t inspire much enthusiasm either. Strictly for specialists.