Karayev - The Seven Beauties, etc

The Guardian 80

Bournemouth SO/Karabits
(Chandos)

Conductor Kirill Karabits describes the music of Kara Karayev as creating “unique mixtures of the traditions of Mahler and Shostakovich, drawing as well on a colourful palette of Azerbaijani folk tunes”. Born in Baku in 1918, Karayev studied in Moscow with Shostakovich from 1942 to 1948. He established himself in 1945 as one of the two composers of the patriotic opera Fatherland, which won him a state prize in Azerbaijan, and over the following decades he went on to play a major role in the musical life of the country, becoming rector of the state conservatory.

In his later works (he died in 1982), he apparently began to explore 12-note techniques, but there is no evidence of those in any of the music that Karabits conducts on this disc. All the works here are programmatic, not to say vividly pictorial. The Seven Beauties is a five-movement suite from 1949 based on a narrative poem by the 12th-century Sunni writer Nizami Ganjavi, which subsequently became the score for the first full-length Azerbaijani ballet. Don Quixote, subtitled “symphonic engravings to Grigory Kozintsev”, is a set of eight brief movements extracted from a score Karayev wrote in 1957 for a film version of Cervantes’s novel, while Leyla and Mejnun is a 15-minute symphonic poem based on another of Ganjavi’s poems, and was awarded the Stalin prize in 1947.