Like Arriaga -- "The Spanish Mozart" -- before him and Canadian composer André Mathieu in his own time, Russian Herman Galynin was a teen composer of considerable note. The core of the early part of his modest output was created before he reached the age of 18; the very idea of juvenilia seems to have been unknown to him, as by that time Galynin was producing fully mature and original conceptions. At the age of about 27, embittered and harassed by the Zhdanov purges and the public humiliation of his idol
Dmitry Shostakovich, Galynin stopped composing. With one or two exceptions, that was about the end of it until he reached the age of 40 when he resumed and at 44, Galynin was felled by a sudden heart attack.
End of story, one might say, although in body he lasted a bit longer, in his creative life some might suggest that Galynin should join the so-called "27 Club," the age at which certain rock stars tend to die. However, Galynin's creative death did not occur at the end of a needle or a shotgun pointed the wrong way. Galynin was dealing with the interference of a ruthless and omnipotent government looking to control all aspects of cultural life and, as an orphan whose life was absorbed in music, he didn't know much about the world outside of the Moscow Conservatory. Galynin's course of study was interrupted twice, first by the German invasion during Operation Barbarossa and secondly in 1948 when he was reassigned to another professor in order to escape the "contamination" from
Shostakovich. Galynin entered the Russian equivalent of a musical prep school in 1937 and the Moscow Conservatory proper in 1941. He did not graduate until 1950, and even as one of his toned down compositions subsequently took the Stalin Prize, Galynin remained stubbornly silent.
Until the appearance of Toccata Classics' Herman Galynin: Piano Music, Vol. 1, Galynin's silence has remained relatively secure. Although his Piano Concerto (1946) is a concert staple in Russia and well known there, and his few instrumentally conceived works recorded for circulation within the Soviet Union, only two of Galynin's works ever made it to the West in the age of the LP. Many of the piano pieces heard here for the first time remain unknown even in Russia. They reveal a composer with seemingly inexhaustible youthful energy, a voracious appetite for musical styles, and a preference for clear, uncluttered textures. One might chalk that up to inexperience, but Galynin is extremely comfortable working in two or three parts, even in piano music. Sharpened by the sardonic wit of
Shostakovich and Kabalevsky and gassed up by the example of
Prokofiev's propulsiveness, Galynin's music has some measure of punk rock attitude. He chews up and spits out older forms like waltz and scherzo, tops
Prokofiev with a machine-gun like Toccata played with maybe three fingers, and indulges in unrepentant blues harmonies in the Aria from his Piano Suite (1945). Apart from a couple of admittedly half-assimilated detours into Scriabin-esque territory, Galynin is always lean, mean, and on the scene. No wonder the Soviet Government wanted him so badly to behave.
Pianist
Olga Solovieva, also known for her peerless advocacy for criminally underrated composer Boris Tchaikovsky, puts the best face on this Russian bad boy with crisp fingerwork and a joyous sense of abandon and forcefulness, yet never to the extent where her enthusiasm clouds the waters. Toccata's recording, as is usual with piano solo recordings, is exactly right, bringing forth the sound of the instrument with all of its percussive touch and ringing tone where it matters most in this music. Anyone interested in twentieth century music -- particularly that of Soviet Russia -- will want to experience this.