Nikolai Roslavets ‒ 3 Etudes

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Nikolai Roslavets (1881 - 1944), 3 Etudes (1914)
Performed by Irina Emeliantseva
00:00 - No. 1 Affettamente
05:35 - No. 2 Pianissimo con dolce maniera
08:45 - No. 3 Burlando
Nikolay Andreyevitch Roslavets has emerged as one of the most fascinating figures in Russian music in the first half of the twentieth century. Unlike most of his composer contemporaries in the early Soviet period, he genuinely came from a peasant background. In autobiographical jottings dating from 1924, he described his birthplace-Dushatino in the Ukraine, where he first drew breath on 4 January 1881 (Old Style 23 December 1880)-as ‘a godforsaken, half-Ukrainian, half-Byelorussian hole’. At first self-taught, Roslavets began to study music during the 1890s by attending classes in Kursk, the nearest large city, and was eventually accepted as a student at the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied violin as well as composition under Sergei Vassilenko and Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov. He graduated in 1912, gaining the Grand Silver Medal for his cantata Heaven and Earth, inspired by Lord Byron’s poetic drama. Even this early Roslavets was associated, along with Alexander Mossolov and Vincent Lourié, with Russia’s artistic avant-garde. He engaged in the vigorous artistic debates occasioned by Futurism, Symbolism and other new ideas, and was close to visual artists such as Malevich.
Roslavets welcomed the revolutions of 1917 and after the Bolshevik Revolution in October he was made director of Kharkov Conservatory, remaining until 1924, when he returned to Moscow and took up a position in the State Publishing House. Describing himself as ‘extreme left-wing’ and ‘an intellectually creative proletarian’, Roslavets directed its Political Department, edited the journal Muzykalnaya Kultura, and was one of the leaders (with his contemporary and friend Nikolay Miaskovsky) of the most progressive of the various new musical bodies competing for attention in the USSR, the Association for Contemporary Music. His colleagues included Miaskovsky, Mossolov, Popov and Shostakovich. The tenth anniversary of the October Revolution was celebrated in 1927 with a concert featuring the premiere of Roslavets’s cantata October in the same programme as that of Shostakovich’s Symphony No 2, ‘Dedication to October’, and Mossolov’s Iron Foundry.
Nevertheless Roslavets was a committed modernist. The direction of his artistic sympathies is apparent from his support for performances of music by the Second Viennese School and his authorship of articles including one entitled ‘On pseudo-proletarian music’. For several years already his works had been under attack from the adherents of ‘proletarian music’, especially members of the RAPM (the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians), who claimed them as counter-revolutionary and bourgeois art for art’s sake. The endless political warfare sapped Roslavets’s strength. In 1929 he was denounced as an ‘enemy of the People’ and in 1930 was forced to publicly repent of his former artistic convictions. He spent some years in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, as musical adviser of the Opera and Ballet Theatre. However he returned to Moscow in 1933 where he lectured at the Polytechnic Institute and was later required to train military band leaders. He made a living out of this and other comparatively menial tasks until he was finally admitted to the Composers’ Union in 1940. He suffered a severe stroke in the same year and was semi-invalid until his death from a second stroke in 1944.

Пікірлер: 51

@MyDominiqueG 5 жыл бұрын

These amazing works by Roslavets, performed here with such care, love AND virtuosity, are a real insight into the new freedom and invention felt so briefly in the Soviet Union of the 1920s. To imagine that he was an outcast from 1930 until his death in 1944! Yet even today Roslavets remains a marginal figure, unplayed and untaught in conservatoires around the world. Let's meet that challenge!

@legojack7711 4 жыл бұрын

Amazingly, I just received two of his preludes as mandatory pieces to perform in a competition next two weeks! Expressively, they combine the fluidity of Debussy with elegant atonality, I am quite astonished by the quality of the composer!

@BilliePosters 2 жыл бұрын

I hate all classical music except for Roslavets. I am u cultured but these songs shake me to my core and fill me with emotion and inspiration

@Racosz 6 жыл бұрын

Post-Scriabin. Simply awesome.

@bonnylevine869 7 жыл бұрын

extraordinary difficult and amazing pieces, bravo to the performer!

@perry1559 6 жыл бұрын

Bonny Levine I saw Hamelin play these about 15-20 years ago. He said it’s some of the most difficult music he’s ever played, especially that first Etude, which he said he had to re-notate to make it easier to read.

@CatkhosruShapurrjiFurabji 3 жыл бұрын

Great work on doing this. I love how the pianist ignores the technical emphasis and brings the nuances amazingly!

@CatkhosruShapurrjiFurabji 3 жыл бұрын

Learning these right now, thanks a lot!

@pianodionisíaco 2 жыл бұрын

He will be appreciated in 2223.

@roslavetsfan7442 3 жыл бұрын

I like the third one very much

@haotianyu6368 9 жыл бұрын

Wonderful channel! Great to see Roslavets scores!

@MegaCirse 3 жыл бұрын

L'œuvre de Roslavets est à découvrir par elle-même, sans nécessairement faire référence à Schönberg. Elle a une profonde originalité et sans la tragédie de sa vie, Roslavets serait peut-être devenu l'un des compositeurs soviétiques les plus importants de sa génération.

@gentle_goy23432 Жыл бұрын

Второй сладкий этюд выражает интересней образ. Я бы сказал , что это что то облачное ну или полётное. Что то красиво летит по воздуху. Прекрасные этюды.

@ThomasLittleComposer 9 жыл бұрын

The triple sharp at 6:17 makes me wonder why Roslavets didn't use enharmonics.

@georgecziffra 9 жыл бұрын

+Thomas Little Roslavets did originally write his pieces enharmonically, but adjusted them for publication so they would accurately spell out the synthetic chords as he envisioned them

@georgecziffra 8 жыл бұрын

It seems he writes new chords for each piece. In the first etude his chord is spelled Cb, C#, D, Eb, F, Gb, G, A, Bb. You'll notice that the chords at the end of this etude are in the same position as the beginning, lending some semblance of tonality to the piece. This seems to be something Roslavets does in all his synthetic pieces (at least all the ones I've analyzed). Etude No. 2's chord is spelled Eb, E#, F#, A#, B, C#, D; again in the same position at the beginning and end of the piece. Etude No. 3's chord is Cb, C, D, Eb, (F?)Gb, G, A, Bb. This one I'm a little unsure about because the F (or whichever note that would be in the transposition) isn't around at the beginning, but starts to appear around the meno vivo at 9:35. You can see this chord with the added F at the end of the piece as well.

@georgecziffra 8 жыл бұрын

I'm talking about the chords. Roslavets' synthetic are generally pretty thick, usually ranging from 6 to 9 notes within the chromatic scale. The order of the pitches within each group also don't seem to matter to Roslavets, unlike Schoenberg's 12 tone serialism, so I suppose it's more accurate to call these tone clusters as opposed to tone rows.

@Mintsoda_15 3 жыл бұрын

♯𝄪

@isaroberts1778 2 жыл бұрын

wow these go hard

@Yubin_Lee_Doramelin 8 жыл бұрын

It's really hard to find a TRIPLE SHARP in the score, and this is the second one I've ever seen. (The first one is in Alkan's Op. 39 No. 10, a.k.a. third movement of Concerto for Solo piano.)

@daveluttinen2547 8 жыл бұрын

The fact that there are 9 of them on one page is quite remarkable. This is an ambitious and ethereal piece - I may have to give it some time for another listen. Bravo to the performer! Thanks for posting.

@НикитаМорозов-т7у 7 жыл бұрын

Yubin Lee Reger Clarinet Sonata (3?)

@georgecziffra 6 жыл бұрын

There's one in the second movement of Alkan's Sonata as well

@michaeledwards1172 5 жыл бұрын

There are also a couple of triple-flats in Roslavets's Piano Sonata no. 1. It can be found, with score, on KZbin.

@toothlesstoe 7 жыл бұрын

I think the rhythmic nuances would be better expressed without parenthetical sub time signatures, but rather with tuplet ratios. For example, in the first etude, the triplet in the right hand in the first half of the measure should be denoted as 3:2, to indicate three 8th notes played within the span of two of the five non-tuplet 8ths; the duplet in the second half of the measure should be denoted as 2:3, to indicate two 8ths within the span of three of the five non-tuplet 8ths. Same thing with the second etude: The quadruplet in the left hand should be denoted as 4:3, and the quintuplet in the right hand denoted as 5:4. When counted out, the 16ths are almost completely even, and it matches up with the time signature. I'm sure this is what Roslavets most likely would have intended, but he could've made the notation much more lucid. Or perhaps he kept it ambiguous to facilitate a broad plethora of interpretations. Whatever the case may be, I'd prefer clarity over ambiguity.

@dalcassian8351 7 жыл бұрын

maybe you have a point but the sublux of the rhythm would have to be subordinated by the held note divisions at bar 56 for example 6:4 would be a better signature and enharmonically suited to the notation roslavets made the correct decision to use ambiguity giving the interpreter more choice over the subliminal message it brings across however he makes a mistake with the overall tonal picture he was trying to achieve by missing out the mystic chord as ascribed to scriabin when playing this i feel ambiguity of which road i wish to take and finally clarity form the chosen road however i play it different everytime depending on my mood on the day

@toothlesstoe 7 жыл бұрын

I'm not sure what you mean by Roslavets making a mistake by leaving out a mystic chord; this actually sounds more mystical than Scriabin's late music, and even more sinister (the first etude does, at least). Also, the mystic chord isn't even that special--it's simply a C lydian dominant 13 chord, which, in my opinion, doesn't sound mystic at all unless, perhaps, you invert it, like Scriabin commonly did with his harmonizations in his later works. And as a sidebar, a "mystic chord" appears in Florent Schmitt's "Mauresque" (a movement out of a piece that I'm working on called _Ombres_ ) and it sounds like the exact opposite of "mystic"; in fact, it sounds scintillating and cheerful. I guess it really depends on the context the chord is placed in.

@scriabinismydog2439 4 жыл бұрын

@@dalcassian8351 As toothless pointed out, the prometheus/mystic chord is just a lydian dominant 13 chord, and it's "mystic quality" is derived from the quartal voicings in which Scriabin uses it. Also, the "chord" almost never appears as a chord, but as a source of melodic/thematic material, or more correlctly as an "harmonic field" let's say, to resolve from the octatonic scale (eg.7th Sonata). Scriabin's mystic chord isn't actually the only "special" chord he used, he used another type of hexachord (it appears in the 8th Sonata) but right now I can't remember the Forte indication. Roslavets' Synthetic Chords are used in a really similar way, but in Roslavets' case the chords are more variegated and make less interactions with other scales, and they can go from 6 pitches per chord to 9. They're similar, but looking more closely you can easily define what is Roslavets and what is Scriabin. Roslavets sounds (imo) way less ecstatic/rapturous and more dark/nocturnal.