Firma Melodiya present a set of symphonies by Vadim Salmanov, a remarkable representative of the Leningrad composing school.
“He organically combines unconditional sings of the contemporary music language – freshness, simplicity, willfulness, multilayer concepts and genuine harmonicity… Speculativeness and sketchiness are totally alien to Salmanov’s music. One can sense the sincerity of a living feeling and inspired fly of fancy in it…Strictness and manliness are inherent in it.” These words were written by one of the greatest Russian conductors, Evgeny Mravinsky, who headed the Honoured Collective of the Republic, the Academic Symphony Orchestra of the Leningrad Philharmonic Society, the best symphony orchestra of the USSR, for fifty years. The symphonies performed by the orchestra at the Big Hall of the philharmonic society are featured in this set.
A graduate of the Leningrad Conservatory, where he studied under Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s prominent pupils such as Mikhail Gnesin and Maximilian Steinberg, a WWII veteran and an admirer of his senior colleague Dmitry Shostakovich since his young years, Vadim Salmanov underwent a significant creative evolution. From the dramatic conflicts of his first symphony, pacified pictures of nature in his second symphony and experiments with a 12-tone technique in his third symphony, he came to an in-depth, philosophical synthesis of the music marks of the 20th century and Russian national melody, which are all present in his last, fourth symphony.
Mravinsky called Salmanov’s symphonic works a “gentle evidence of the age that begot him”.