Nikolai Roslavets

Nikolai Roslavets began as one of the most rebellious Russian composers of the 1910s, was declared an "enemy of the people" in 1929 and ended his life in obscurity in Moscow. On this Naxos disc the violinist Solomia Soroka and the pianist Arthur Greene play three of his violin sonatas, the First of 1913, the undated Fourth and the late Sixth. The Three Dances, published in 1923, complete the programme. The Third and Fifth sonatas are lost.

The duo recorded at Sauder Concert Hall, Goshen College, Indiana, from 9 to 12 December 2005, with Matthias Stegmann engineering and producing with Soroka. Soroka was born in L'viv and took her doctorate at the Eastman School; Greene studied at Juilliard with Martin Canin and teaches at the University of Michigan. His booklet note explains Roslavets's "synthetic chords", building blocks that hold the melodic material and can be transposed systematically. The programme runs backwards in time. The Sixth, published by Schott in 1996, has three movements in traditional tonality, and Jonathan Woolf in MusicWeb International (2006) heard "a big rather later romantic and decidedly Brahmsian piece". The Fourth is a single movement after Scriabin's late sonatas, opening with a martial theme in wide leaps. The one-movement First Sonata, written just after Roslavets left the Moscow Conservatory, is denser still, especially in rhythm, and Woolf notes it is widely held to be the first atonal work by a Russian composer. Of the dances, the Mazurka sets five beats across two bars. Woolf credits the players with "drawing out some portamenti and colouristic devices to point up his febrile romanticism".

Naxos CD 8.557903, released in 2006, with booklet notes by Arthur Greene.