Symphony No. 3 (Lyatoshinsky)

Boris Lyatoshinsky completed his Symphony No. 3 in B minor in 1951, subtitled "Peace Shall Defeat War".[1] It was first performed on 23 October 1951 in Kyiv,[2] by the Kyiv Philharmonic, conducted by Natan Rakhlin,[3] at a concert of the plenum of the board of the Union of Composers of Ukraine.[4] According to the memoirs of contemporaries, at the premiere of the work, the audience gave Lyatoshinsky a standing ovation. In his memoirs about Boris Lyatoshinsky, the composer Anatoliy Kos-Anatolsky wrote: "At one of the compositional plenums, in the 50s in Kyiv, the third symphony of B. Lyatoshinsky was performed. This work in the first edition made a deep but slightly gloomy impression on me, and I imagined the author as a withdrawn, strict, and dismal person."[4]

Despite this, shortly after the premiere, the Union of composers of Ukraine at a meeting with guests from Moscow M. Koval and E. Zakharov condemned the work as "anti-people" and called it "formalistic rubbish that needs to be burned."[3] The reasons for this are clear: after all, the symphony, written shortly after the Second World War, contained the epigraph "Peace Shall Defeat War",[2] and the final of the symphony in the original edition was far from victorious, but tragic. The composer was accused of interpreting the war theme "not as a Soviet supporter of peace, but as a bourgeois pacifist."[3]

The composer was forced to rework the symphony, and remove the subtitle, if he wanted the work to be performed again.[2] In particular, he had replace the finale with a victorious and optimistic one. The first performance of the revised version symphony took place in Leningrad in 1955, by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Yevgeny Mravinsky.[2] This was no coincidence — if the symphony was "approved" in the Russian SSR, the composer could no longer be persecuted for this work in Kyiv. In addition, Mravinsky's authority was also a kind of defense for the work. After the performance of the symphony in the new edition, the attitude towards it suddenly changed, and it was dubbed a significant work for Ukrainian symphonic music. It was in this version that the symphony continued to be performed for decades, until ideological taboos were lifted after the collapse of the USSR. In the original version, the symphony was performed by conductors Volodymyr Sirenko and Igor Blazhkov.

Mikola Gordiychuk describes the genre of this work as a symphonic drama.[5] This is indicated by both the artistic content of the work itself and its compositional idea. Lyatoshinsky consistently applies the principle of leitmotifs, as well as, in part, monothematism, because different parts of the cycle are closely related to each other due to the internal kinship of key thematic elements.

In addition, the composer widely uses polyphonic techniques for presenting and unfolding the material: topics are superimposed on each other, transformed, complicated by imitations, canons (in particular, canonical sequences), fugato, and so on. At the same time, the composer uses polyphony not only in the development, but also in the exposition sections of the form.[6]

An important component of this work is Ukrainian national music.[1] The modal themes-leitmotif of the symphony "germinate" from specific folklore sources, but at the same time are not quotes, but the author's reflections on the corresponding melodies.

The third symphony is Lyatoshinsky's only four-movements symphony, while all of his other symphonies have three movements each.

• Symphony No.3, Op.50 (Lyatoshinsky, Boris): Scores at the International Music Score Library Project