It was a good thing that these two discs arrived simultaneously. My initial impression of the symphonies was that Boris Lyatoshynsky (1895–1968) the most acclaimed Ukrainian composer of his day, was something of an awkward throw-back, writing symphonies rather in the manner of his teacher Gliere (which is to say colourful, dramatic and agreeably noisy) but updating that style with a good deal of quasi-modern angular chromaticism, strenuous counterpoint and heavy, often rather coarse scoring. I then turned to the other collection, its list of titles suggesting his lighter music and encountered... well, I was about to say ''another composer'', but that would be an exaggeration. ''The same composer but more affectionately performed'' is closer to the truth, but still an overstatement.
The Polish Suite is an intriguing, queerly individual sequence of pieces, including a mysteriously shimmering, entrancingly lyrical nocturne, a sinister little funeral march that lurches towards Shostakovich and a set of variations on a most peculiar tune, each a little character study or an exercise in wry caricature. There is a variation for percussion alone which fades into the distance (mysterious fadings are almost a Lyatoshynsky hallmark, I'm beginning to learn) at which a celesta turns the theme into the demurest mock-minuet imaginable and then demonstrates that it could just as well have turned into a chorale. Cue not for knowing laughter but for a baleful dies irae of a coda and the tenderest possible echo of the earlier, lovely nocturne. Most odd.
By now I'd found another Lyatoshynsky, and of course I more readily recognized him on playing the symphonies through again. A rum customer, though, and not always an easy one to get on with, with his obsessive subjections of every idea that comes into his head to grimly purposeful counterpoint, his intense fondness for the bass end of the orchestra, the frown that overcasts even some of his most plangent or lyrical melodies. But he certainly has his moments. In the Fourth Symphony, for example, the slow movement begins in the blackest gloom, the frown now a grimace or a snarl. But then there arrives a chorale surrounded by shimmering bell sounds: a brief but really haunting invention. After the vehement and often rowdy finale, similarly, the coda consists of beautifully poised, lyrical string solos over a subdued glitter and again a quiet clashing of bells.
It sounds as though I'm saying that he writes striking and individual moments and makes them sound more so by setting them within a context of glumness. Not quite: his themes are often striking, their presentation bold and the conflicts between them strong. But it would be the shorter pieces rather than the symphonies that I would recommend you sample first. Try the magical little Intermezzo (arranged from a string quartet movement), a shadowy, quiet spell of a piece, delicate melodies floating over a gently rocking pulse. Then even the Lyric Poem, which has a good many of the symphonies' frowning gestures but also moments of ghostly poignancy and another of Lyatoshynsky's haunted epilogues. Words like 'shadowy', 'quiet' and 'ghostly' are easier to apply to Virko Baley's collection than to Theodore Kuchar's handling of the symphonies. The latter are enthusiastic, up-front, bold and occasionally coarse. I wonder whether they would seem less knotted, less overstated and overdeveloped in Baley's hands. But a hearing of his disc can certainly send you back to Kuchar's, hunting for poetry like that of the Intermezzo and the Polish Suite amidst all that strenuousness.'