Who was Vladimir Dukelsky? Good question. In another life, you may have heard of him as “light” music composer Vernon Duke. Apparently, he was also one of Serge Diaghilev’s favorite composers after Stravinsky and Prokofiev, and during the 1920s and ’30s he composed several ballets for the great Russian impresario, Zéphyr et Flore being one of them. The music, it should come as no surprise, melds Stravinsky’s brittle neo-classicism with Prokofiev’s tunes and (as far the bass drum is concerned) scoring. It’s a real discovery, and anyone who enjoys the music of those two composers, or Les Six, will know what to expect and will find their time amply rewarded. Epitaphe is something else entirely, a moving choral setting for soprano, choir, and orchestra of a poem by Osip Mandelstam lamenting the death of “old Russia”. It was composed in 1931, seven years before Mandelstam was sent into internal exile in one of Stalin’s artistic purges, and could not have been a more topical expression of the homesickness of the large, expatriate Russian community living in Paris between the two World Wars. Gennady Rozhdestvensky performs this music with his customary care and conviction, and the sound is excellent. We need to hear more of Dukelsky, who died in 1969 and clearly had something to offer musically.
