In the spring of last year, at the meeting of producers of the Nordic and Baltic countries in Riga, it was decided to join forces in the “Shadow” project of the Nordic and Baltic countries, which would allow highlighting the undeservedly forgotten or unnoticed composers of their country. It was expected that the mosaic of stories would not only demonstrate the reasons for possible neglect – be they aesthetic, political or social – but also introduce the international audience to various bright musical personalities and quality music. As a result, the Euroradio community is offered stories about the life and music of nine composers born between 1839 and 1962 – provided by music producers from Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, Iceland and Lithuania. Along with the introduction – about a ten-minute long story about the chosen composer – these programs include full-length compositions, totaling an hour. In this program – the name of Latvia, and we are represented by Orests Silabriedis, choosing to introduce the listeners of the Nordic and Baltic countries to Romuald Greenblatt.
Born in the Russian city of Tver in 1930, the Jewish composer Romualds Grinblatt lived in Riga for only two decades, but his impact was great and significant. After graduating from the Leningrad Music High School, the talented son of a doctor and a prominent textile artist, Romualda Grīnblatt, was not admitted to the Leningrad Conservatory, probably because of the Jewish issue, he came to Riga and entered the Latvian Conservatory. Learned the Latvian language and became his own. And – with his St. Petersburg temper, he made Latvian composers look at what was happening in other countries.
Grinblatt’s First and Second symphonies in the second half of the 1950s were masterfully composed, yet opuses created in a kind of Soviet expressionist tradition.
In the early 1960s, Grīnblatt presented a dodecaphonic piano concerto, and Raimonds Pauls, who would later become a superstar of Latvian popular music, played solo in the first performance.
For a living, Grinblatt wrote music for theater performances and movies, but at the same time followed his own modernist path: he studied the available scores of foreign composers and sought to learn everything new, as much as it was possible for a Soviet citizen.
In the Fourth Symphony composed in the second half of the 1960s, Greenblatt had the idea to compose separate parts for separate groups of orchestral instruments – alternating strings, winds and percussion, and this symphony was highly appreciated by Shostakovich and Nono. The score of the Flute Concerto drawn on graph paper looks quite extravagant, where the 12-tone system has acquired a special luster in Grinblatt’s imagination.
When it comes to theater music, first of all, we should mention the hugely acclaimed and popular ballet “Rigonda”, which in the late 1950s brought fresher winds to the Latvian National Opera, both in terms of music, choreography and scenography.
An independent masterpiece is the opera “Bārddziņa meita”, which was sung in unison with the instrument ensemble parts not by professional musicians, but by the actors of the Riga Youth Theater, and the performance is dazzling. I managed to find this recording quite by chance in the archive of the St. Petersburg Composers’ Union – yes, in the early 1970s Grīnblatt left Latvia because the Ministry of Culture did not really want to buy his philharmonic stage works and the Minister of Culture hardly loved his former classmate Grīnblatt, because he had a much brighter brain and also quite shameless sharp tongue.
Grīnblatt can also be called one of the pioneers of the rock opera genre in the Soviet Union – his “Tils Púcesspiegelis” was hugely popular in St. Petersburg in the second half of the 1970s.
Unfortunately, “Til” did not have a long stage life, because the music was perhaps a little too clever for the average listener. However, to this day, Grinblatt’s symphonic hit “Moliere’s Life”, created from the music for the staging of Bulgakov’s play “The Yoke of the Saints” at the Riga Russian Drama Theater, is still playing in St. Petersburg.
In the spring of 2023, he finally managed to get the notes published in France – Grīnblatt’s Humoresque policière, or “Criminal Humoresques”, which Latvian bassoonist Edgars Karpenskis-Allažs, studying in The Hague, included in his exam program.
Romualds Grinblatt passed away in the summer of 1995 after an aggressive illness that put an end to his desire to emigrate to Germany and continue his creative life there.
Until the end of his life, Grīnblatt was interested in what was happening in Latvia, and at the end of the 1980s he emotionally deeply experienced the revival of Latvia on the way to regaining its independence.
Romuald Grīnblatt’s music sporadically returns to Latvian concert life. A few years ago, his Sixth Symphony also arrived in the second homeland of its creator, and we will also get to the last one – the Seventh. Grīnblatt loved Petersburg very much, but his heart was in Latvia.
The program features the music of Romuald Greenblatt:
Flute Concerto – Vilnis Strautiņš and the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leonid Vīgner, 1979
Piano sonata – author, 1969
Fifth Symphony (1983) – Latvian National Symphony Orchestra conducted by St. Petersburg conductor Ravil Martinov
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2023-11-24 18:42:31
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