【维亚切斯拉夫•阿尔乔莫夫】奥林匹斯之路 (Vyacheslav Artyomov - Symphony: The Way to Olympus)

USSR State Academic Symphony Orchestra / Timur Mynbayev

Conceived and partially realized in 1978, this is a one-movement composition with a slow introduction. It conveys the idea of overcoming inertness and passivity for the sake of movement, an aspiration for perfection, for finding integrity in one’s inner development.

The premiere performance of the first version by Veronika Dudarova and the State Moscow Symphonic Orchestra took place during the Moscow Autumn Festival on October 11, 1979, at the Bolshoi Hall of Moscow Conservatory and was repeated a year later — during Warsaw Autumn Festival and had a great importance for my further musical development .

“The Way to Olympus” is the first symphony of four in the cycle “Symphony of the Way” on which I worked for over 30 years. The final version of this symphony was first performed on January 13, 1987 and this is the version heard on this recording. The work was published by “Kompozitor”, Moscow, 1997. The composition is an introduction, its moral themes to be further elaborated in the next, also programmatic works in the tetralogy – the symphonies “On the Threshold of a Bright World”,  “Gentle Emanation” and “The Morning Star Arises”.

All four symphonies present different stages in the spiritual progress of the symphony’s hero. Heading the score of the symphony there is an epigraph from Seneca: ”…and then, may be, you will achieve the peaks, or that places about which you alone will know that they are not yet the peaks”. The symphony is dedicated to my wife, poetess Valeriya Lyubetskaya.