Nikolai Roslavets: Sad Landscapes (1913)

Описание: Nikolai Andreevich Roslavets was a modernist composer active in the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union. Roslavets was a convinced modernist and cosmopolitan thinker; his music was officially suppressed from 1930 onwards.

In the 1910s Roslavets' compositions were published in Russian Futurist journals, and futurist artists designed some covers for his music. After 1917 the composer became one of the most prominent public figures of "leftist art" in Russia, together with Arthur Lourié, Kazimir Malevich, Vsevolod Meyerhold and others. Roslavets taught violin and composition in Elets, Kharkiv (then known as Kharkov, where he was director of the Musical Institute) and Moscow. He had a position in the State Publishing House, edited the journal Muzykalnaya Kultura and was one of the leaders of the Association for Contemporary Music.

As a musicologist, Roslavets fought for professionalism, the best in Russian, Western classical and New Music; criticizing vulgar identifications of music with ideology (exemplified in his article ‘On pseudo-proletarian music’). He wrote the first Russian article about Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire. This led to him being harshly attacked in the 1920s by the "proletarian musician" movement, especially by the representatives of the "RAPM," Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians and Prokoll (Production Collective of the Students at the Moscow Conservatory). Roslavets was accused of being a "counter-revolutionary" and "bourgeois" artist, "alien to the proletariat", as well as "formalist", a "class enemy" and in the late 1920s and early 1930s, a "Trotskyist", "saboteur"; etc.

Though the "new system of sound organisation" regulates the whole twelve-tone chromatic scale, most of Roslavets’ "synthetic chords" consist of six to nine tones. In the 1920s Roslavets developed his system, expanding it to encompass counterpoint, rhythm, and musical form while elaborating new principles of teaching. In Roslavets' earlier romances and chamber instrumental compositions those sets were already elaborated side by side with expanded tonality and free atonality. The mature forms of this "new system of sound organization" are typical for the pieces composed between 1913 and 1917, such as Sad Landscapes (1913), Three Compositions for Voice and Piano (1913), String Quartet No. 1 (1913), Four Compositions for Voice and Piano (1913–14), and the Piano Sonatas Nos. 1 (1914) and 2 (1916, reconstructed by Eduard Babasian), etc.

HB: in this unknown recording, It's missing the 3rd song (Blessed Hour (Благословенный час), which is nowhere to be found online. If you were able to find it, please let me know and I will redo the score video!

Timestamps:

Photograph 0:00
I. Autumn Song (Осенняя песня) 0:01
II. Sunset (Закат) 2:55

Recording:    • Nikolai Roslavets - Грустные пейзажи (Sad ...  
Performers: Unknown

Composed by Nikolai Andreevich Roslavets (1913)
Librettist: Paul Verlaine (1844-1896)
INR 27
For voice (Soprano) and Piano.