Nikolai Roslavets - Music for Cello and Piano (Alexander Ivashkin; Tatyana Lazareva)

Information

Composer: Nikolai Roslavets

• (01) Meditation
• (02) Cello Sonata No. 1
• (03-07) Five Preludes
• (08) Cello Sonata No. 2
• (09) Dance of the White Girls

Alexander Ivashkin, cello
Tatyana Lazareva, piano

Date: 2001
Label: Chandos
https://www.chandos.net/products/catalogue/CHAN%209881

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Review

Roslavets was much admired by Shostakovich, and this disc, featuring his complete music for cello and piano, confirms that he was a real talent. He was also a composer who pushed back the boundaries of stylistic acceptance, and as a result fell into disfavour when Stalin's policy of Socialist realism attempted to impose conservative quasi-romantic values on new music.

During the 1920s Roslavets was at the cutting edge of the new Soviet music, a leading figure in the new society established by the Bolsheviks, and it was at this time that he composed his two cello sonatas and the Meditation. The appealing Dance of the White Girls is an altogether earlier composition, from 1912, before the Revolution. The Five Preludes for piano solo follow the style of Scriabin, and are impressive in both technique and content.

Scriabin, moreover, informs practically all the music contained here, if only by initial reference; the starting point for later developments. For it was his chromatic style, pushing back the confines of conventional harmonies, that led on to the intensely expressive, almost serial techniques so often favoured by Roslavets. The two sonatas are particularly powerful in their expression, and all credit to Ivashkin and Larazeva for their committed performances, and to the engineers for the excellent quality of the recorded sound. There is a wide range of contrasting musical elements here, not least of dynamics, while the single-movement Meditation offers a more appealing mood, as its title would suggest.

-- Terry Barfoot, MusicWeb International

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Nikolai Roslavets (4 January 1881 [O.S. 23 December 1880] – 23 August 1944) was a significant Ukrainian Soviet modernist composer. He studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Jan Hřímalý, Sergei Vasilenko, Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov and Alexander Ilyinsky. Roslavets was a convinced modernist and cosmopolitan thinker. For this, his music was officially suppressed from 1930 onwards. His name was hardly mentioned in Soviet musical literature. Among Roslavets' works are five symphonic poems (three of them are lost), two violin concertos, five string quartets, two viola sonatas, two cello sonatas, six violin sonatas, and five piano trios.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Roslavets

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Alexander Ivashkin (17 August 1948 – 31 January 2014) was a Russian cellist, writer, academic and conductor. Ivashkin studied at the Gnessin Institute, where his teachers included Gennady Rozhdestvensky and Valery Polyansky. He also played electric cello, viola da gamba, sitar and piano. Ivashkin was the first performer and dedicatee of many contemporary compositions for cello, by such composers as Alfred Schnittke. He was also the curator of Alfred Schnittke Archive at Goldsmiths and the editor-in-chief of the Schnittke Collected Works Critical edition. He made commercial recordings for such labels as Chandos, BMG and Naxos.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Ivashkin

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