Reinhold Glière, a composer who had not previously crossed my radar, proved to be something of a discovery when the CRR Orchestra, conducted by Carlo Tenan, accompanied the Turkish horn-player Can Kiracı in his Horn Concerto in B flat major at the Cemal Reşit Rey Concert Hall on May 9.

^{Can Kiracı and conductor Carlo Tenan}

Reinhold Glière (1875–1956), photographed above in 1917, was a Russian composer of German and Polish descent. Born in Kiev, he studied composition, harmony and counterpoint at the Moscow Conservatoire under Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov, Anton Arensky and Sergei Taneyev. Although little known outside the countries of the former Soviet Union, he had quite a distinguished career. After graduating from the Conservatoire, he became a teacher at the Gnessin College of Music in Moscow. In 1902, thanks to an introduction from Taneyev, he gave lessons to the 11-year-old Sergei Prokofiev on the latter’s parental estate. Then, in 1914, he was appointed director of the Kiev Conservatoire. One of his composition pupils there was Vladimir Dukelsky, who, after spending a year and a half in Istanbul with his family as refugees, emigrated with them to the USA, subsequently becoming well known in the West as ‘Vernon Duke’, the composer of songs such as ‘Taking a Chance on Love’, ‘April in Paris’ and ‘Autumn in New York’.

Glière never visited Europe after the Revolution of 1917, preferring instead to give concerts in Siberia and other remote corners of his native country. In 1920, he moved to the Moscow Conservatoire, teaching there intermittently until 1941. 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.

Glière’s ‘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 the principles of socialist realism. Despite being chairman of the Organising Committee of the Soviet Composers’ Association from 1938 to 1948, he succeeded in staying out of political entanglements, though composers who found themselves in hot water with the authorities for their ‘bourgeois tendencies’ resented his immunity to official criticism. Being hauled over the coals for writing ‘non-Russian’ music by chief inquisitor Andrei Zhdanov (1896-1948), a delightful individual who had played a role in the ‘Great Purge’ of 1937, was no joke: Dmitri Shostakovich, who was among those pilloried for ‘formalism’ (whatever that meant), was summoned to make a public apology in front of the investigating committee, and took to sleeping on the landing outside his flat so that his family wouldn’t be disturbed when the secret police came to take him away. (Fortunately, that didn’t happen.)

Glière had been honoured three times with the Glinka Award before the Revolution. One of these awards was for his Third Symphony, written between 1909 and 1911 and subtitled Ilya Muromets, this being the name of a Russian bogatyr (hero) who is the subject of an oral epic poem. The work was championed by the conductor Leopold Stokowski, and earned its composer international fame. Here is a recording (with the score) of Ilya Muromets by the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of the celebrated JoAnn Falletta. The notes under the YouTube version are excellent, and very instructive. Look out for the masterfully orchestrated, and thus marvellously creepy, beginning of the second movement at 21:24 and the subsequent depictions of bird song in a gloomy forest inhabited by a brigand with supernatural powers (shudder!).

Reinhold Glière’s Horn Concerto was premiered by the Russian horn-player Valery Polekh and the Leningrad Radio Symphony Orchestra in May, 1951. My network of musical informants tells me that the brass section as a whole is thriving in Turkey, with lots of good young players emerging, and Can Kiracı proved this point by giving an excellent rendition of the Glière concerto. (As a former horn-player myself, I can vouch both for the difficulty of the piece and for the technical competence he displayed.)

The orchestra, too, shone, and not long after the beginning the brass section belted out an impressive fanfare. In the slow second movement, the soloist produced a smooth-as-butter tone. (I have to say that in the first movement some of his low notes had sounded a little overblown – can I use that word in this context? – and thus a trifle crude, but we will let this pass.) The woodwind department were perfectly in tune throughout, while on occasions the conductor demonstrated his control over the orchestra by just pointing a finger at whoever was due to come in next rather than extending a hand towards them. Co-ordination was never an issue, and all in all it was a most enjoyable and rewarding performance.

Here is a rendition of Glière’s Horn Concerto in B flat major, Opus 91, by Radek Baborák (who won the prestigious ARD Competition in Munich in 1994) with the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Ondrej Lenárd. At 19:43, just after the beginning of the jolly finale, there is a chorale that reminds me of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. (This recurs at 22:30.)

After an interval during which my companion’s attention was taken up by the street cats that had invaded the lobby outside the auditorium (not that they seemed to recognise that this space was anything but their own), the CRR Symphony Orchestra played Mozart’s Symphony No 38 in D major, K 504, the so-called ‘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 to be continued in his last three symphonies (Nos 39-41), and that – crucially – was to be imitated by Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert.

The performance on May 9 did not begin well. Coordination was poor, and the orchestra seemed to lack confidence. I surmised that this was because the Glière concerto had taken the lion’s share of the rehearsal time. If true, this would be entirely understandable, but nevertheless the sudden dip in the quality of playing was a bit of a cold shower. Perhaps in order to focus the orchestra’s attention more closely on what they were playing, the conductor jumped around on the podium a good deal. This stratagem seemed to work: things perked up considerably in the second movement, in which we heard some beautiful playing from a well-coordinated woodwind department.

In this recording of Mozart’s ‘Prague’ symphony, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe is being conducted by Bernard Haitink at the BBC Proms. Notice the frequency with which the woodwind department comes to the fore in the exquisite second movement (which begins at 13:45), and their solos in the third, especially in minutes 23-27.

At this concert, it was undoubtedly the Glière horn concerto that made the strongest impression on me. I have since become a fan of this son of an instrument-maker from Saxony who in 1938 was honoured with the title ‘People’s Artist of the USSR’, and I congratulate whoever it was who decided to give him a hearing in Istanbul.

I will leave you with his most famous work. In 1927, he wrote the music for a ballet that was at first entitled Krasny mak (‘The Red Poppy’) but later changed to Krasny tsvetok (‘The Red Flower’) to obviate any suggestion that the work was about opium. Praised as ‘the first Soviet ballet on a revolutionary subject’ (don’t worry – it isn’t as tedious as that dire accolade suggests), it contains an arrangement of a Russian folk song that is sometimes described as Yablochko (‘Little Apple’), and sometimes as the ‘Russian Sailors’ Dance’. As the piece is quite brief, but nevertheless loses no time in working itself up to a frenetic climax, it is often played as an orchestral encore. Here is a rendition by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Leonard Bernstein. And what a rousing knees-up this is! Speaking of which, if you are tempted to perform a can-can to it, you are hereby warned to remove any dentures beforehand and to keep your tongue well back in your mouth during your exertions, in case those surging knees should involuntarily collide with your lower jaw. Cavort with caution!