Something of a composer, writer and teacher (1881-1950, born in Poland but spent practically all of his life in Russia/the USSR, except for a stint in WWI I gather, and a ) with a "cult" following, I guess. (Prokofiev's best friend and "co-conspirator" in his student years, writing pieces together and occasionally annoying their professors... teacher of Khachaturian, Kabalevsky, Shchedrin, and quite a few others.)
I first heard Miaskovsky's cello concerto (1944) on the radio, from an LP recording with Mstislav Rostropovich playing the cello part, twice during my first year of college, and several other works in the campus library (and, again, on the radio- good station near my college)- and since the Soviet record label Melodiya had recorded, and various labels here redistributed/licensed/..., quite a few works of his (see e.g.
partial worklist and discography,
this article by me mirrored at Myaskovsky.ru (the original is at www.kith.org), the site
Myaskovsky.ru itself, for instance... -- anyway...
(the Myaskovsky.ru site has been redone and doesn't seem easy to navigate now. The list of works is
here.)
While a lot of his 86 (87?) published works were recorded or at least circulated on private tapes, three important ones escaped fans like me until pretty recently (... well, about five years ago)- three of his symphonies, no. 4 from 1917-8, no. 14 from 1933 and no. 20 (yes- there are 27) from 1940, were unknown, by sound anyway. I did borrow a score of no. 20, photocopied the second section (Adagio, C major, pages 50-65) and made a MIDI of a 2-piano reduction in lieu of having some actual recording to listen to. I will say I loved the piece. Simple... (ish!) in structure, but among the better music I'd heard by this composer already - lovely and noble.
A few years ago I did get to hear a recording of the 20th symphony (as originally conceived, not 2-piano reduction)- the only recording there's been, and even that, no longer available- (review
here) (was listening to my copy of it last night and again today). The return of themes of the slow movement at the end of the piece should be loud, bombastic, annoying and shouldn't work (that is, it does seem hard to see how it could work), and maybe it's my own subjective attachment to the piece talking- in any case, the cheer of the last pages seems right.
