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Ukrainian composers highlight: Nikolai Kapustin [1]
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Date: 2023-07-02
As the supposedly not a war in Ukraine ramped up, stuck up music critic David Hurwitz started getting lots of requests for recommendations of Ukrainian composers. At first he ignored the requests, wanting his Classics Today channel to stay apolitical.
But then he obliged and posted a video about a few Ukrainian composers on YouTube. I watched the video and jotted down a couple of names for later research and even went to the university library to look for some more names to look up in the Naxos Music Library (NML), a music streaming service available to individuals and institutions like universities. But then I forgot about the matter entirely.
When I log out of the NML, it shows a screen highlighting some new album. Of course I would have to log back in if I wanted to hear that new album right away. These past few days, the new album on the logout screen has been the new Frank Dupree album of Kapustin’s music on the Capricio label.
I made a note to myself to check the album out the next time I logged in to the NML, but it wasn’t until today that I acted on that reminder. Track 1 has Kapustin’s Piano Concerto No. 5, Opus 72, a track running almost 21 minutes.
The NML has this problem that sometimes tracks in excess of eight or so minutes just abruptly stop short of eight or nine minutes. As I have institutional rather than individual access to the NML, I guess would have to ask my institution to contact Naxos about this problem.
Maybe another day. For now, I’ll just choose a shorter composition, or one is that split up into shorter tracks. Hmm, Concerto for Two Pianos and Percussion, Opus 104, in which Dupree is joined by Adrian Brendle on second piano, Meinhard Jenne on drum set and Franz Bach on other percussion, tracks 2 to 4.
I hit play, and I was impressed by what I heard. Not what I was expecting at all. I guess I was expecting something more avant-garde, given that the concerto was written in 2002, but instead I was pleasantly surprised by melodious jazz.
I don’t remember if Hurwitz mentioned the Ukrainian-born Никола́й Ги́ршевич Капу́стин (Nikolai Girshevich Kapustin) in his video about Ukrainian composers. If not, it could be because people consider Kapustin, who lived and worked Soviet Russia and stayed in Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union, to be more of a Russian composer. Or it could be because Kapustin is considered more of a jazz composer.
On paper, Kapustin has all the trappings of a classical composer. His published works have classical titles complete with opus numbers, he studied at the Moscow Conservatory — which was founded by Russian Jewish brothers Anton and Nikolai Rubinstein and is now named after Tchaikovsky, considered the greatest classical composer and definitely the conservatory’s greatest alum — and several of his large ensemble compositions are for traditional orchestras like the ones Rubinstein and Tchaikovsky wrote for.
But Kapustin is not a classical composer like Rubinstein or Tchaikovsky. According to Alla Vladimirovna Grigor′yeva for Oxford Music,
Kapustin’s work largely belongs to the ‘third stream’, a stylistic trend associated with experiments to synthesize jazz and more formal music. In the works he wrote during the 1960s there was a perceptible attempt to interpret the traditions of George Gershwin, Duke Ellington and A. Tsfasman, on the one hand, and Russian piano music, on the other (First Piano Concerto and various piano pieces).
In the CD booklet notes written by Christian Heindl in German and translated to English by Aaron Epstein, we learn that
In order to be protected from the fighting during the Second World War, [Nikolai Kapustin] was evacuated to Kyrgyzstan at the age of three with his family.
The musically precocious youth eventually made his way to the Moscow Conservatory, and eventually became the principal pianist of the Great Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra, now called the Grand Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra (БсоПИЧ).
After the departure of chief conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky [of the БсоПИЧ], noted for his openness to diverse stylistic worlds, the interest in Kapustin’s music declined in general. Many of his works were only premiered very belatedly during the last two decades. It was only late in his career ... that his works were taken on by the renowned Schott publishing house and increasingly received international attention. Not much time remained for him to enjoy the wide enthusiasm that he has kindled with his music for several years. According to those close to him, however, he never strove for the spotlight anyway. ... Thus he never felt obliged to attend all the premieres or subsequent performances of his works, even when they took place in Moscow. Nikolai Kapustin died on July 2, 2020 in Moscow.
Here’s a video of Kapustin himself on piano playing one of his own compositions:
I’m not sure about the URL shown at the end of the video, though. It might have been a legitimate website with information about Kapustin, but now it looks like it was hijacked by spammers.
The Chinese jazz pianist A Bu is, like Dupree, also a champion of Kapustin’s music.
To be fair to Hurwitz, the critic has reviewed Dupree’s Kapustin albums and recommended them highly. However, Hurtwitz does seem to forget, like so many others, that Putin’s aggression against Ukraine started in 2014, if not earlier, and definitely long before Kapustin’s passing in 2020.
I would like to think that Kapustin would like other Ukrainian musicians to have the freedom to migrate to Russia like he did or stay in Ukraine as their preference may be, unfettered by dictators like Stalin or Putin.
On this third anniversary of Kapustin’s death, I hope you check out some music by Kapustin, which, in addition to being available on the NML and YouTube, is also available on Amazon and Spotify (on the latter I did get to listen to the whole Piano Concerto No. 5, after putting up with some ads for something or other).
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/2/2178929/-Ukrainian-composers-highlight-Nikolai-Kapustin
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