The good news is, now I have a glorious summer ahead of me! I'm using it primarily to practice for my junior recital in the fall. There will be lots of lovely music: Scarlatti, Hovhaness, Beethoven, and Kabalevsky. By the end of the summer, I will have written excitedly about all of it. I will also be brushing up on my French and fostering my morbid fascination with the Soviet Union. (I'm starting with this.)
Speaking on Russians, I've been falling more deeply in love with Kabalevsky. I also want to know why I can't find much of his choral music here. Is it a silly copyright law? Is it because America thinks of it as Soviet propaganda? He did adhere much more strictly to socialist realism than either Prokofiev or Shostakovich. Is it because so much of it was composed during the Cold War? We weren't exactly buddy-buddy with Russia during Kabalevsky's lifetime. (Van Cliburn was greeted with ticker tape parades when he won the Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow in 1958. Generally, pianists don't get parades. It's like Cliburn was a war hero or something. He went into battle and stole that first place from the Russians! Hooray!)
In all seriousness, though, I really would like to know why so much of his music is not available to me. If anyone knows, please tell me!
There are a couple of practical reasons for the unavailability of Kabalevsky's music - one is the extraordinary complexity of copyright law surrounding works produced in the Soviet Union. While I don't know specifically about Kabalevsky, my understanding is that Shostakovich's works were for a time considered to be public domain, and are now copyright-only again.
ReplyDeleteNow when a work is copyrighted by a small publishing house in Russia, it's just not likely to circulate to the U.S. I've run into this problem in trying to procure Sofronitsky's Scriabin recordings - you have to special-order the discs from record companies in Russia through Russianglish websites, pay international shipping, etc.
Also, Russian vocal/choral music just isn't very available in the U.S. because of the linguistic problem. Every competent singer/teacher can read and pronounce Italian, German, French, Spanish, etc....but Dr. Scott at Baylor is the only Russian-speaking vocal teacher I have met in Texas. It's only recently that a "Singer's Russian" has been produced, and it's very difficult to find IPA transcriptions of any texts.
The problem is further compounded with choral religious works in Russia, which are in the "dead" language Old Slavonic.