In the first half, the Istanbul State Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of the Italian conductor Carlo Rizzari (who regularly conducts the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome), will accompany the Turkish horn-player Can Kiracı in the Horn Concerto in B flat major, Opus 91, by Reinhold Glière (1875-1956), a Russian and Soviet composer of German and Polish descent. Born in Kiev, Glière studied composition at the Moscow Conservatory under Sergei Taneyev, later becoming Director of the Kiev Conservatory. His Horn Concerto, completed in 1951, was premiered by the Russian horn-player Valery Polekh and the Leningrad Radio Symphony Orchestra in May that year.
Glière, despite being little known outside the countries of the former Soviet Union, had quite a distinguished career. In 1911, he taught the eleven-year-old Sergei Prokofiev on this latter’s parental estate. Then, in 1923, he was invited to Azerbaijan by the People’s Commissariat of Education to compose what was intended to be the prototype of an Azerbaijani national opera. The result was Shakh-Senem, which integrated Azeri folk song with Western approaches to form and orchestration (with a little orientalism thrown in) and is considered to have laid the foundations of the Soviet-Azerbaijani national opera tradition.
His ‘Slavic epic’ cantatas and his symphonic style – one marked by lyricism, rich harmony, bright orchestral colours and perfect traditional forms – were sufficiently conservative and ‘appealing to the masses’ to preserve him from the persecution of the Zhdanov era, which began in 1948 and prescribed strict adherence to socialist realism. Despite being Chairman of the Organising Committee of the Soviet Composers’ Association from 1938 to 1948, he managed to stay out of political trouble, though composers who found themselves in hot water with the authorities for their ‘bourgeois tendencies’ resented his immunity to official criticism.
Glière was honoured three times with the Glinka Award before the Revolution. One of these awards was for his Third Symphony, entitled ‘İlya Muromets’, this being the name of a Russian hero; the work was championed by the conductor Leopold Stokowski, and earned its composer international fame. Later, between 1946 and 1950, he received three Stalin Prizes (first class) for his works.
In the second half, the orchestra will play Mozart’s Symphony No 38 in D major, K 504 (the ‘Prague’ symphony). This work, written towards the end of 1786, was premiered in Prague – a city where (unlike Vienna) the composer was always popular in his lifetime – in January 1787. Its extensive use of wind instruments is seen by some as a nod to local tastes, Bohemian wind-players being famous throughout Europe during those times. Some authorities maintain, however, that Mozart had in any case been experimenting with the use of wind instruments in the accompaniments to his piano concertos, so the important role assigned to the wind department in the ‘Prague’ Symphony is no more than a continuation of an earlier departure. Whatever the case may be, the prominent use of wind instruments in this symphony represents a major advance in Mozart’s compositional style that was continued in his last three symphonies (Nos 39-41), and that – crucially – was imitated by Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert.
