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02/23/2025
“Censored Anthems”
Dimitri Shostakovich: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, opus 29: “Adagio”
Mieczyslaw Weinberg: Concertino for Violin and String Orchestra, opus 42 [1]
Edvard Mirzoyan: Symphony for String Orchestra and Timpani [2, 3]
Ian Niederhoffer: What does censorship sound like? An exploration [4]
Arya Balian [4] (soprano), Aubree Oliverson [1], Joel Lambdin [2] (violin), Andrew Beall [3] (timpani), Parlando Orchestra, Ian Niederhoffer (narrator [4] and conductor)
Recording: Markin Hall, Kaufman Music Center (August 16‑17, 2023) and Swan Studios (March 18 and June 25, 2024), New York City, New York – 74’47
Delos DC3610 – Booklet in English
“Censored Anthems” is the debut recording of the Parlando Orchestra and is comprised of works by composers who were officially censored, vilified and silenced during Joseph Stalin authoritarian rule.
Parlando’s conductor-founder, Ian Niederhoffer, wanted the orchestra’s first release to integrate “performance with historical and cultural storytelling.” And this 30‑piece string orchestra accomplishes this and more. Recorded in 2024 at Swan Studios in New York, the album showcases the technical artistry of this orchestra right out of the gate.
It opens with Niederhoffer’s string transcription the five minute “Adagio” movement of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk which dramatizes Katerina’s despair over her husband’s affair and her loveless marriage. The orchestra masterfully evokes the emotions of the scene as the orchestra’s sinuous depth of sound ignites Shostakovich’s operatic gravitas.
Shostakovich was just 29 and at the height of his powers both artistically. The opera was a hit with audiences and critics, performed hundreds of times over the next two years, until Stalin attended a performance. Stalin was apparently bothered by the volume of the brass section and/or just in a foul mood and left before the third act.
Whatever the reason, Stalin made sure the opera was summarily trashed in the propagandist newspaper Pravda the next day, where the unnamed critic called the opera, “Muddle instead of Music” and bourgeois decadent. Shostakovich was officially out of favor, and in its aftermath, Stalin installed the council that flagged any music that wasn’t pro‑Soviet enough.
Next on the recording is Polish composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s Concertino for Violin and String Orchestra. Weinberg fled to Russia to escape the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. Separated from his family, he didn’t find out until years later that his parents and sister were sent to a concentration camp and were murdered by the Nazis.
Weinberg continued his studies in Soviet Russia, and musically adhered to Russian nationalist approved idioms. After World War II (WWII), Stalin was purging Jews and ordered the murder of Weinberg’s father‑in‑law, a Yiddish actor and leader of the Jewish Anti‑Fascist Committee. Weinberg was also targeted and harassed by a KGB agent policing his music and his friendship with Shostakovich.
Composed in 1948, the Concertino opens with an “Allegretto cantabile” peppered with sharp violin counterpoint, dynamically performed by soloist Aubree Oliverson, at once supple and steely, is set against a forest of agitated pizzicato. Throughout the piece Oliverson articulates every dimension of the journeying violin solo wending through the rhythmic tension that breaks out in Weinberg’s galloping Vivaldi‑esque finale.
Composer Edvard Mirzoyan studied music in Yerevan and composed works reflective of Armenia’s musical heritage. During the Ottoman Empire’s purge of the Jews in World War I (WWI), his family was deported from their country during WWI. He continued his studies in Moscow, and after he served in the army during WWII, he returned to Yerevan and continued his career, premiering his Theme and Variations for String Quartet and faced criticism from colleagues (including Aram Khachaturian) that his music had become ‘Russified.’ He soon returned to his own compositional style and his distinct musical roots.
Mirzoyan’s Symphony for String Orchestra and Timpani opens with a 12‑minute string “Allegro moderato”, transcribed to evokes the traditional sacred voices of the Armenian Orthodox choir. The solemnity gives way to a swirling torrent of strings, and it is punctured with the insistent drums of timpanist Andrew Beall in a turbulent interplay between the strings and a bombardment of drums. Principal violinist, Joel Lambdin’s violin solo passages are reined in.
In contrast, the second movement opens in a jaunty “Allegro ma non troppo” with Beall’s drums at an echoey distance. Mirzoyan also laces an orchestral variation of an Armenian folk song, as a slightly dissonant pastorale. That preludes the third movement (“Adagio-Andante doloroso) with an homage to the father of Armenian music, composer/music anthropologist Komitas, who was arrested and deported and later died in a psychiatric hospital. This symphony was also Mirzoyan’s requiem for victims of the Armenian Genocide by the Ottoman Empire during WWI.
The atmospherics of the mournful strings soar into deviant progressions with cinematic intensity, then running itself down like an unwinding clock. The final “Allegro vivo” has an almost sprite opening, but it glides into Mirzoyan’s rakish subversion of the initial musical warmth. The final movement begins as a somber interlude that gives way to a dizzying swirl of strings and the bombardment of Andrew Beall’s timpani, expressing a triumphal allegro vivo. Niederhoffer writes that the Mirzoyan’s symphony stands as “a monument of Armenian resilience in the face of cultural erasure.”
“Censored Anthems” is a stirring and most timely tribute to composers who paid the price for artistically standing up to tyranny in their lives and through their music. In audio tracks at the end of the recording Niederhoffer narrates his own commentary about the orchestra and these defiant masterworks.
Lewis J. Whittington
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