Chandos’ continuing devotion to the relentlessly mediocre Valeri Polyansky remains a total mystery. Funding must be coming from somewhere, because it’s difficult to imagine any label actually paying for this seemingly endless series of indifferently played, poorly recorded performances. The lunacy of this enterprise only deepens when you realize that Chandos has in its catalog an excellent performance of the Ninth Symphony from Neeme Järvi, one so superior to this that you’d have to be deaf not to notice. So what on earth is going on at a label that used to set a standard for adventurous programming and sonic excellence but seems to have gotten stuck in a very deep artistic rut?
The performance of the Ninth is seriously flat-footed. Right from the start the lack of crispness from the strings, the want of rhythmic snap, and the underpowered tempos tell the entire story. Adding insult to injury, the recording is so reverberant that rapid passages become a blur. Correction: even not-so-rapid passages sound poorly. Consider the opening of the slow movement, where the solo clarinet, already far too loud and unappealing of tone, seems to be playing a game of “echo” with itself. The effect is hideous, and the whole performance captures neither the work’s pathos nor its tongue-in-cheek wit.
As for the other major work, the First Piano Concerto, soloist Tatiana Polyanskaya plays with a heavy hand, revealing her relationship to the conductor musically as well as personally. The forward balances don’t help: at times the piece sounds like a concerto for piano and double bass section alone. Listening to the lacerating final pages, it’s depressing to recall that Chandos boasts one of the reference recordings of this same work in its catalog, with the composer’s son (Maxim) and grandson (Dmitri), accompanied by I Musici de Montreal. The shorter works add nothing of interest: the two choruses are arrangements of socialist-realist music by one A. Davidenko and reveal little of musical value. And the film score The Adventures of Korzinkina can be heard to better effect as played by Rozhdestvensky on Melodiya. Unpleasant, to say the least.
