Notes from the Keyboard
On Lyadov and his Prelude (from ‘1948’ CD booklet)
It is difficult to imagine what course classical music of the 20th century could have taken had Anatoly Lyadov fulfilled Diaghilev’s commission to write The Firebird for the 1910 Ballets Russes season (the delay on Lyadov’s part led to an invitation to the then completely unknown Igor Stravinsky); some historians even doubt that he accepted the commission in the first place. Few could doubt, however, Lyadov’s skill as an orchestral composer: his tone poems Baba Yaga and Kikimora, written just a few years earlier, exhibit virtuosic handling of orchestral colour and an imaginative approach to harmony. Despite this, his orchestral output remained scarce, and the main body of his work consists of beautifully crafted piano miniatures, one of which, the Prelude from his Three Pieces, op. 11, we have recorded alongside larger works written by his famous pupils.
Born in 1855, Lyadov studied composition in Saint-Petersburg with Rimsky-Korsakov and, in the course of his life, managed to lose his position in the Conservatory twice: first, in 1876, as a student, he got expelled for poor attendance; years later, in 1905 (by then a professor, a teacher of Myaskovsky and Prokofiev, among others) he left to show his solidarity with his former mentor Rimsky-Korsakov, who got fired for his liberal political views. Young Sergey Prokofiev, who studied harmony in Lyadov’s class, described his lectures as “dry”, and admitted to “never having tried to connect his lessons with my compositional plans”. According to Prokofiev’s “Autobiography”, Lyadov applied a method which only allowed his pupils to use a very limited amount of chords to harmonise a given melody. However, Lyadov’s “sharp eye” did not let any mistakes in 4-part exercises go unnoticed, and his students progressed rapidly.
Outside his harmony classes Lyadov was anything but conservative - he organised a concert to commemorate Mussorgsky’s life and works, conducted performances of Alexander Scriabin’s First and Second Symphonies, and was actively involved in musical life of Saint-Petersburg right until his death in 1914. His Prelude in B minor, opus 11, composed in 1885 and arranged for cello and piano the following year, is marked by naturalness, humbleness and sincerity of expression, economy of texture, unmistakable “Russian-ness” of the melodic material and complete absence of sentimentality.