History will be made this summer when the PRISMA (Pacific Region International Summer Music Association) Festival Orchestra presents the world premiere of Symphony No. 3 by Russian composer Alexander Mosolov (1900–1973).
Composed throughout 1958 and 1959 but never performed or recorded, this forgotten work is finally being brought to life by conductor Arthur Arnold, who unearthed the handwritten manuscript during his decade-long tenure as music director of the Moscow Symphony Orchestra.
Mosolov, once touted as the "experimental head" of the early Soviet avant-garde, is best known for his groundbreaking 1927 composition Iron Foundry, which turned the clanging and banging of factory machinery into a revolutionary orchestral sound. But his innovation – and his refusal to conform – soon put him at perceived odds with the state. Arrested in 1937 for “anti-Soviet propaganda,” he spent time in a prison camp and was blacklisted for years from Russia’s biggest metropolitan centres.
Arnold first encountered Mosolov’s lost legacy through his friend, entrepreneur and music philanthropist Max Gutbrod, who himself had been tipped off by the musicologist Inna Barsova. Gutbrod brought Arnold the score of a Mosolov opera, Hero (1928), and Arnold began to seek out more of the composer’s elusive scores and learn as much as he could about his life.
In 2018, Arnold and the Moscow Symphony performed and recorded Mosolov’s Concerto for Harp & Orchestra (1939) and Symphony No. 5 (1965). The album was later released on the Naxos label, winning an award and sparking international attention. From there, he dove even deeper into Mosolov’s body of work – and eventually, with the assistance of Gutbrod’s wife, Heide Mehring, paid a visit to the Lenin Library where the manuscripts of Symphony No. 3 and 4 were hiding.
Arnold recalled one extraordinary moment where the librarian on duty, fully aware of the rules, turned her gaze while he photographed every page of the handwritten scores using his phone. Later, he and a colleague digitized them and transcribed all the individual instrumental parts.
Symphony No. 3 is a study in contrast – brooding yet joyful, dark yet free – and marks a clear departure from Mosolov’s earlier folksy music. It also foreshadows some of the themes found in Mosolov’s later compositions – including Symphony No. 5.
“It’s like he couldn’t help but return to certain musical ideas and themes. Clearly, they were anchored in his musical vocabulary,” said Arnold.
But for the most part, musical clues have been minimal. Mosolov was not exactly a micro-manager when it came to notation, almost as if he assumed his works might never be performed. Reportedly, he gave some original manuscripts to tenor Sergei Radamsky, who fled the Russian Empire, asking him to take them to the United States in the hope that conductors there might one day bring the music to life.
“It’s like finding a sealed time capsule,” added Arnold. “You have to make every choice – tempo, dynamics, phrasing – from the score, without a reference point. There is no recording, and no one alive who has ever heard it. I play it on the piano and imagine the sound of the orchestra instruments but the only way to really know what it sounds like is to play it with an orchestra.”
Arnold and Gutbrod had originally planned to perform and record both Symphony No. 3 and No. 4 with the Moscow Symphony Orchestra as a follow-up to their 2019 Naxos release. But the pandemic brought those plans to a standstill; and after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Arnold resigned from his post in protest. With the regime once again dictating the fate of Mosolov’s art – albeit this time a little more indirectly – the score for Symphony No. 3 remained confined to the shelf for a little while longer.
Curtain call
At long last, Symphony No. 3 will receive its inaugural curtain call on June 27, 2025, when the four-movement, 30-minute work is brought to life at the Evergreen Theatre in Powell River Recreation Complex—some 8,300 kilometres from the Moscow Conservatory.
Delivering the premiere performance on Friday, June 27, will be the PRISMA Festival Orchestra, composed of elite young musicians from over 15 countries who have convened in Powell River to attend PRISMA’s immersive two-week training program. Gutbrod plans to make the trip from Berlin to witness this historic event.
This marks the second Mosolov-related milestone to be witnessed by audiences in Powell River. In 2019, Arnold presented the Canadian premiere of Concerto for Harp and Orchestra at the PRISMA Festival, featuring American harpist and PRISMA alumna Taylor Fleshman, the same soloist heard on the Naxos recording.
“Mosolov is perhaps the last important Russian composer yet to be properly rediscovered,” said Arnold, listing more famous peers like Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev. “His voice was silenced for decades. To give him a platform now, through the passion and talent of PRISMA’s young musicians, is incredibly meaningful. We’re not just making music together; we’re continuing the story of a forgotten composer.”
Arnold hopes this upcoming premiere of Symphony No. 3 sparks a broader rediscovery, inspiring conductors and scholars to engage with Mosolov’s neglected works. Signs of growing interest are already appearing.
The manuscript score of the Concerto for Harp and Orchestra has now been published in Russia by Compozitor St. Peterburg and by Le Chant du monde in Paris, both with Arnold’s help. Renowned harpist Xavier de Maistre included the concerto on his 2022 album with the WDR Sinfonieorchester, conducted by Nathalie Stutzmann.
Arnold is looking forward to documenting the PRISMA Festival Orchestra’s upcoming performance in video and audio format “so that people can finally hear the music and decide for themselves how it speaks to them.”
But even he is holding off on making any final conclusions about Symphony No. 3 until he experiences it live with an orchestra. Only then, he says, will it be possible to truly understand where it fits within the broader arc of Mosolov’s artistic output.
“In many ways, it’s like walking through a creek and picking up a stone,” he said. “You can’t quite tell just by looking whether it’s a rare gem or simply a beautiful piece of quartz, but something about it makes you stop and take a closer look. That’s kind of how I feel about these forgotten works.”
To learn more about the history of the Mosolov Project to date, go to arthurarnold.com. To learn more about Mosolov’s Symphony No. 3, read Arnold’s movement-by-movement program notes.
To learn more about the PRISMA Festival and the upcoming world premiere performance, go to prismafestival.com.
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