Nikolai Roslavets

This Naxos disc collects the music for cello and piano of Nikolay Roslavets (1880-1944), a Russian modernist of the 1920s. Independently of Schoenberg, he built his works on ‘synthetic chords’ of six to nine notes, transposed across all twelve degrees of the chromatic scale. He joined the Communist Party after 1917 and led the Association of Contemporary Music, where he promoted Webern and Schoenberg. Attacked by the proletarian musicians of the RAPM, he left the Party and moved to Tashkent in 1927. His name did not appear in print again until 1978, and the rediscovery of his music began in earnest only in the late 1980s.

The Bulgarian cellist Lachezar Kostov and pianist Viktor Valkov, long-time duo partners who made their Carnegie Hall debut together in 2009, recorded the programme on 23 and 24 October 2008. The sessions took place at the Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, with Leszek Wojcik as producer and engineer. The Cello Sonata No. 1 of 1921 is a single movement without key signature, its opening six-note chord treated like the main theme of a traditional sonata, while impassioned and introspective passages alternate. Razdum’ye (Meditation), from the same year, walks over a measured piano figure that Anastasia Belina’s booklet note links to the opening song of Schubert’s Winterreise. The Cello Sonata No. 2 of 1922, at almost twenty minutes the longest work here, opens on fragile piano chords that return between its pensive, lyrical sections. Tantsï belïkh dev (Dances of the White Maidens) of 1912 is nominally in A major but avoids the tonic, resting on an ostinato that finally fades into silence. The disc closes with a Viola Sonata of 1926 transcribed for cello. Reviewing it for MusicWeb International in 2011, Steve Arloff heard the two instruments as "equal partners, the piano having as much to say as the cello".

Naxos CD 8.570996, released in March 2011, with booklet notes in English by Anastasia Belina.