The Lost Romantic

Mikael Tariverdiev was one of the most important Soviet film composers of all time. With a career spanning four decades, he composed over 130 film scores, became the first Head of the Composers’ Guild of Soviet Cinematographer’s Union and received the prestigious People’s Artist of Russia award. But in the West, his name does not carry nearly the same weight. Collectors with shelves full of Herrmann, Carlos and Glass should, by all rights, have an entire shelf devoted to Tariverdiev (right after Tangerine Dream, of course). But due to a lack of availability, and to the composer’s own reluctance to leave home (“I love my sofa,” he quipped), most students of Western music will swear they’re looking at some new Leonard Cohen collection when they see the cover of Film Music.

That’s just what Earth Recordings and Steven Coates (of electro swing forerunners the Real Tuesday Weld) are aiming to remedy with this release. In 2011, after Coates first heard Tariverdiev’s soundtrack for Goodbye Boys in a Moscow café, he immediately sought out more of the man’s music. Ultimately, he found the composer’s widow, Vera Tariverdieva, who came forth with a wealth of her late husband’s tapes, his half-inch reel to reel machine and her own familiarity with his work. Film Music is the product of these ingredients, along with a bit of curation from Coates himself.

Unlike a traditional, linear anthology, Film Music paints a picture of Tariverdiev himself, rather than a front-to-back summary of his career. Over three discs (subtitled “Goodbye Boys,” “Snow Over Leningrad” and “I Am a Tree”), the collection jumps back and forth in time with a surprising level of continuity. No matter the style (romantic, rag, swing, waltz, etc.) or emotional weight of the piece (to compare the cartoonish “My Younger Brother” to the somber “Dolphins,” both recorded in 1961, would be to compare “When You’re Smiling” to “Strange Fruit”), Tariverdiev’s passion is consistent. Along with an eerily persistent chord progression (a musical signature, perhaps?), his piano work, alternately playful and brooding, is the thread which binds most of the pieces together, lending a lemons-out-of-lemonade attitude to most of the collection. Set apart from the films for which they were composed, these songs generate their own characters – some voiced by the composer himself – who gaze out train windows, tread wet cobblestones and even cry out to absent lovers with at least a glimmer of optimism.

The centerpiece to this captivating collection may literally be the centerpiece: disc two’s “Snow Over Leningrad,” which consists of selections from two popular miniseries, Seventeen Moments of Spring and The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath! Two ballads from the latter, “Along My Street for Many Years” and “I Asked the Mirror,” both sung by Soviet mezzosoprano Alla Pugacheva, could squeeze tears from a stone. Anyone left wanting by 25 may have a use for that industrial-sized box of Kleenex after all.

Another major highlight is “The Last Romantic,” a sweeping piano and tenor sax composition boasting an unforgettable melody which, in a Cold War free universe, may have found its way into Taxi Driver. It’s actually hard to imagine Tariverdiev’s obscurity surviving in such a world, but perhaps he really was just a homebody whose style jived perfectly with the directors with whom he worked. In any case, Film Music, with its warm and faithful reproductions of the prolific composer’s work, will surely lead to a new appreciation of its contents.