: Music of the Russian Avant-Garde 1905-26 - Roger Woodward

With the artistically, politically and socially fascinating period of transition from Tsarist Russia to the Soviet Union, Stalin is the source of the works on Roger Woodward's new recording Music of the Russian Avant-Garde (1905-1926).

After Woodward's successful re-release of preludes and fugues by Shostakovich from 1975, here follows a new recording in a review of little-known compositions that Woodward had not attended to since his student days in Warsaw in the early '70s. At that time, he succeeded in getting access to rare works, often almost lost, from the hands of Lina Prokofieva, Prokofiev's widow, and the archives of Polish Radio.

These include three exquisite preludes by the son of Alexander Skryabin, Julian, who composed these shortly before his death after eleven years as a prolific composer. Until his studies in philosophy at Marburg Phillips University in 1909, Boris Pasternak who is better known as the author of Dr. Zhivago, was mainly active as a composer.

This is music with the greatest conceivable span, from echoes of the late Romantic period to an anticipation of the later contemporary music in Western Europe with elements of Russian sacred music of the Znamenny-singing and synthetic chords (sintetakkord), as in the work of Roslavets and influences of esoteric schools of thought, as they had come to be expressed in the theosophical ideas of the time.

The recital includes works by Nikolai Obukhov (1892-1954), Aleksandr Skryabin (1872-1915), Julian Skryabin (1908-1919), Boris Pasternak (1890-1960), Aleksandr Mosolov (1900-1973), Nikolai Roslavets (1881-1944) and Aleksei Stanchinskiy (1888-1914).

As an author, Woodward's essay gives a good insight into the life and art of the time.