Alexander Raskatov

Two works from 1991 by the Russian composer Alexander Raskatov, conceived as a diptych. Commentary on a Vision for solo percussion and orchestra links its sound aggregates by a kind of dream logic. Xenia, for chamber orchestra, is its light counterpart, drawn from ideas of childlike innocence and paradisiacal naivety.

Raskatov was born in Moscow on 9 March 1953 and graduated in composition from the Moscow Conservatory in 1978, in the class of Albert Leman. In 1994 he moved to Germany at the invitation of the publisher M. P. Belaieff, and in 1998 he received the composition award of the Salzburg Easter Festival. The soloist is Mark Pekarski, a percussionist who founded his own percussion ensemble in Moscow in 1976 and teaches at the Moscow Conservatory. He plays with the Symphony Orchestra "S. Rachmaninov" Moscow conducted by Valentin Ponkin. Ponkin, born in Irkutsk in 1951, is a Russian conductor and teacher, People's Artist of Russia since 2002. He was chief of the Yaroslavl Philharmonic Orchestra from 1990 to 2004. The recording was made in December 2000 at the Mosfilm studio in Moscow. The booklet notes are by Michael Struck-Schloen, translated by Stephanie Wollny.

Commentary on a Vision lasts thirty minutes in three movements, a first of more than twelve minutes followed by two of about eight and a half. There are no consecutive developments. Unforeseeable events appear in a quasi-visionary way, as if from the subconscious, and then vanish again. Xenia, a single movement of twenty-five minutes, turns the same means toward lightness. Its starting points are the innocence of a child and the naivety of paradise, held against the darker vision of the first work.

The pairing shows two sides of Raskatov's music of the early 1990s, written a few years before he left Russia and recorded in Moscow a decade after its composition. His later work reached the opera house: A Dog's Heart, after Bulgakov, was premiered at the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam in June 2010 and also given by English National Opera. At the request of Irina Schnittke he completed a performing version of Alfred Schnittke's Ninth Symphony.

CD, Wergo WER 6628 2, released in 2001, total time 55'23".