Victor KOSENKO PASSACAGLIA -TATIANA PRIMAK KHOURY (piano)

TATIANA PRIMAK KHOURY PLAYS KOSENKO PASSACAGLIA from "11 Etudes in form of old dances "op 19,
passacaglia, (Italian, from Spanish passacalle, or pasacalle: "street song"), musical form of continuous variation in 3/4 time; and a courtly dance. The dance, as it first appeared in 17th-century Spain, was of unsavoury reputation and possibly quite fiery. In the French theatre of the 17th and 18th centuries it was a dance of imposing majesty. Little is known of the actual dance movements and steps. Musically the passacaglia is nearly indistinguishable from the contemporary chaconne; contemporary writers called the passacaglia a graver dance, however, and noted that it was identified more frequently with male dancers.Both the passacaglia and the chaconne gave rise to musical forms. Baroque composers used the two names indiscriminately, writing rondeaux (pieces with recurring refrains) as well as variation forms under both titles (see chaconne). Musicians have had difficulty defining the two forms. One opinion is that the chaconne is a series of variations over a short repeated theme (ostinato) in the bass—a basso ostinato, or ground bass—whereas in the passacaglia the ostinato may appear in any voice. Another view is that the passacaglia uses an ostinato normally in the bass but possibly in any voice; but the chaconne consists of variations over a harmonic ground, like a jazz riff, a series of chords that underlies the variations. Such a series may imply a constant bass line (of the chords), but merely as a component of the harmony.Viktor Stempanovich Kosenko (1896--1938) trained at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where he studied composition and theory with Mikhail Sokolov, a Rimsky-Korsakov pupil, and piano with Irina Miklashevskaya. His early years were hard, much as they certainly were for most other artists of his generation in a young Soviet Union. It wasn't until 1929 that his employment prospects began to improve with a teaching position at Kiev's Lysenko Institute of Music and Drama. In 1934, he accepted a post at the Kiev Conservatory, and in 1938, he received the Order of the Red Banner. With many concerts, a great deal of teaching, and a small number of published works to his credit, Kosenko died in his early forties of kidney cancer.

As for the Eleven Etudes, they fit into a genre of "olden style" pieces that reflected late 19th/early 20th-century nostalgia for a sentimentalized or nationalized 17th- or 18th-century past. A variety of composers tried their hand at this, including Grieg, Parry, Elgar, Giordano, Massenet, Reger, and Saint-Saëns, among others. Their works were never intended to be mistaken for period music, but were amiable stylizations that embedded thematic, harmonic, or contrapuntal devices in a generalized Romantic language, then poured the results into small-scaled Baroque or Classical dance forms.

Kosenko's collection of gavottes, minuets, courantes, rigaudons, etc, fits perfectly into this group. It's conventionally Romantic, with nothing evident of the olden style save in titles and a very occasional turn of phrase. Brahms, instead, is the main influence on Kosenko. Rhetorical devices and harmonic progressions occasionally point directly to specific pieces by the older master (the Sarabande in A Minor glances at Brahms's Piano Concerto in D Minor), but the overall sense is of a composer finding his own creativity in the language of another, rather than simply as a Brahmsian manqué. The quality of the works varies, but at their best, they demonstrate some imagination, an idiomatic use of the instrument, and a good deal of charm.

Yet even if the music had no significant quality of its own, it would still be interesting because it had been composed at the end of the 1920s in the Soviet Union. This was a period unfriendly to traditional nationalists like Glière, much less composers who "whored after foreign gods." (Fears of ideological contamination from abroad have a lengthy history in Russia, and the government there has always played this card successfully—much as governments have done elsewhere, but seldom with such ceaseless success.) Although the radicals of the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians who briefly controlled the Soviet musical apparatus in the late 1920s were never as doctrinally unified as some musicologists believe, their repeated friendliness to Kosenko is surprising. Beginning in 1927, they invited the composer to give a concert of his music in Kharkov each year, for three consecutive years. Kosenko was also allowed to publish some of his music at that time, and his teaching position at the Lysenko Institute has already been mentioned. None of this would have been possible without RAPM intervention;