Modest Mussorgsky - Unorthodox Music (Claire Booth; Christopher Glynn)

Information

Composer: Modest Mussorgsky

1. The Goat (A Society Tale)
2. Memories of Childhood: I. Nanny and I
3. The Nursery: I. With Nanny
4. The Nursery: II. In the Corner
5. Memories of Childhood: II. Nanny Locks Me in a Dark Cupboard
6. The Nursery: IV. With the Doll
7. The Nursery: VI. Hobby Horse
8. Porte-enseigne Polka
9. Desire
10. Impromptu-passionné
11. From my tears
12. Hopak of the Merry Young Ukrainians
13. Night
14. Hopak
15. Oh, How Your Eyes Look At Me Sometimes
16. Oh, You Drunken Sot!
17. Intermezzo in modo classico
18. Songs and Dances of Death: III. Trepak
19. Album Leaf: Méditation
20. The Leaves Rustled Softly
21. Pictures at an Exhibition: Cum Mortuis in Lingua Mortua
22. Sunless: I. Within Four Walls
23. Sunless: VI. On the River
24. Rêverie

Claire Booth, soprano

Christopher Glynn, piano

Date: 2021

Label: Avie

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Review

I suspect that “Unorthodox Music” refers as much to the program concept behind this release as it does to Mussorgsky’s utter originality. Soprano Claire Booth and pianist Christopher Glynn have created a 70-minute recital that ingeniously intersperses songs with solo piano pieces. The selections are organized into thematic subgroups that take the listener through The Nursery and Youthful Years to Marriage and Loneliness. Yet one doesn’t need to grasp the programming trajectory in order to appreciate the composer’s extraordinary inventiveness and expressive immediacy.

Many of the songs are veritable mini-operas, packed with sudden changes of mood, quick dynamic shifts, and volatile juxtapositions of dramatic and lyrical vocal writing. Take “Hobby Horse” from The Nursery, for example, with its onomatopoeic phrases that are both playful and petulant. On the other hand, Mussorgsky’s introspective side conveys a haunting and evocative fragility, as in “From My Tears”, or the “Cum mortuis in lingua morta” movement from Pictures at an Exhibition.

Claire Booth’s light and agile soprano voice navigates Mussorgsky’s wide interval leaps with ease, while her superb diction and rhythmic pointing bring stylish vividness to more extroverted songs without a trace of vulgarity (Trepak from Songs and Dances of Death and the Hopak are good cases in point). And Christopher Glynn proves as masterful and authoritative by himself as in a collaborative capacity. He projects a sustained calm in the closing selection Reverie that easily holds its own alongside recordings by well-known soloists. While the slightly diffuse sonics could be more robust for my taste, they plausibly replicate a concert hall perspective. Highly recommended.

-- Jed Distler

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Modest Mussorgsky (21 March 1839 – 28 March 1881) is a Russian composer. Composing without training in his teens, he met several composers, with whom he later made up The Five, and received his first composition lessons from Mily Balakirev in 1857. His major works include the symphonic poem Night on Bald Mountain (1867), the great opera Boris Godunov (1868), and the famous piano cycle Pictures at an Exhibition (1874). His 65 songs describe vivid scenes of Russian life. After Mussorgsky’s death, his works were published in drastically edited form, purged of their distinctive starkness and unorthodox harmonies.

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Soprano Claire Booth was born in the early 1980s in Britain's Yorkshire region and studied at Oxford University, where she won double first-class honors, and at the Guildhall School of Music. Instinctively drawn to contemporary music, she attracted top composers to write works especially for her from the beginning of her career. Booth has also amassed a substantial repertory of traditional operatic works, becoming one of the few singers to excel in both fields. Her recording career began in 2010 with an album of works by Alun Hoddinott. Since then she has participated in many releases on NMC, Naxos, Avie and Orchid.

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Christopher Glynn (born 5 September 1974) is a British classical pianist and Artistic Director of the Ryedale Festival. Born in Leicester, he read music at New College, Oxford and studied piano with John Streets and Malcolm Martineau at the Royal Academy of Music. Glynn has subsequently performed in recital and recorded with many well known singers, instrumentalists and chamber ensembles. He is especially noted for his Lieder in English initiative, longstanding collaborations with singers including Roderick Williams and Claire Booth, and a series of recordings of neglected English song composers. 

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