The usual critical
position is to view Roslavets as a creative compound of Scriabin
and Schoenberg, a visionary who worked independent of the
latter and was eventually crushed by the Soviet system. Certainly
the early atonal experimentation was later to be replaced
after his 1929 denunciation with a far more malleable and
acceptably simple style. This trajectory is reflected in this
recording of the first, fourth and sixth violin sonatas.
Cannily perhaps
or just to confound the listener Naxos has programmed the
sonatas to reflect the opposite trajectory. We begin with
the undated but late Sixth Sonata, a big rather later romantic
and decidedly Brahmsian piece. It’s also quite loose and discursive
with soloist Solomia Soroka employing some period devices
to point up the succulence of the writing. The central movement
has maybe a touch of Grieg and a reminiscence of French style
in the sonata repertoire, the more lyric and effusive wing
of the French repertoire rather than the Franco-Belgian hothouse
of Franck and Lekeu. The fluttering arabesques of the finale
coalesce with the lyrically sensuous central section. Here
the piano can sound rather overpowering in the balance.
The Fourth Sonata
is undated. Predicated at least structurally on Scriabin’s
piano sonatas it seems to me to share as much with Szymanowski.
The piano writing is emphatic and there is here unlike the
Sixth (this is a considerably earlier work) a real sense of
billow and passion, a hothouse drama played out with concision
and power. Though the notes mention that Roslavets trained
as a violinist they don’t mention that he studied with Jan
Hřímaly, one of the many émigré Czech musicians who taught
and played in Russia and were profoundly influential on the
emergent Russian School. It was doubtless from the cosmopolitan
Hřímaly, who died a couple of years after the premiere
of his pupil’s shocking First Sonata, that Roslavets learned
the wider violin repertoire.
That First Sonata,
widely accepted as the first such atonal work produced by
a Russian composer, came shortly after his graduation. He
always claimed to have worked independent of Schoenbergian
procedure and there seems no reason to disbelieve him. The
booklet notes quote Miaskovsky in his day job as a critic
admiring but puzzling over the sonata’s newness. It certainly
must have come as a pungent shock. Abstract juxtapositions
and terse material are here but so too is a soaring late romantic
lyricism; Roslavets moves between the two in bewildering and
generous openness. This naturally only adds to the queasy
emotive stability of this one movement sonata.
As an envoi we
have the Three Dances published in 1923. Once again there
is a certain residual influence of Scriabin but in the central
dance, a crepuscular Nocturne, an unmistakeable Szymanowski
patina.
The recording
sometimes rather favours the piano in climactic moments though
one wouldn’t want to make too much of this. Both Solomia Soroka
and Arthur Greene, who wrote the notes, sound inside the terse,
coagulant bloodstream of Roslavets’s imagination, drawing
out some portamenti and colouristic devices to point up his
febrile romanticism.
Jonathan Woolf
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Solomia Soroka (violin)
