Anthology of Piano Music by Russian and Soviet Composers, Vol. 3

LEV REVUTSKY (1889-1977): Song (Tikhon Khrennikov Jr.), VSEVOLOD ZADERATSKY (1891-1953): Sonata No. 2 (Fedor Amirov), NIKOLAI ROSLAVETS (1881-1944): 5 Preludes, 2 Poems, SAMUIL FEINBERG (1890-1962): Sonata No. 5, Op. 10 (Yuri Favorin), SERGEI PROTOPOPOV (1893-1954): Sonata No. 3, Op. 6 (Amirov), VLADIMIR DESHEVOV (1889-1955): Rails (Nikita Mndoyants).

Description: Veteran collectors of the early 20th century Russian piano avant-garde will note that there are two unrecorded major works here, the sonatas by Zaderatsky (1928) and Protopopov (1924-28) and together they take up 47 of the disc's 72 minutes. The former has a cinematic biography (saved from execution when the man next to the room in which he was playing an old piano the night before he was to die, having been captured fighting against the Communists in the post-World War I Russian Civil War, turned out to be Felix Dzerzhinsky; he was later imprisoned two more times and wrote this sonata right after the second one) and his 23-minute, single-movement sonata seems cinematic also or, perhaps, nightmarish. A funeral march, deadened and drained of all emotion leads to several more animated sections which each peter out and the march comes back at the end - inescapable, like some nightmares one has. Protopopov's 24-minute piece, also in one movement, uses both a theory of tritones and another theory of modal rhythm (which plainly demand formal musical education and access to arcane textbooks and theories) and a lot of extravagant pianism derived from late Scriabin to produce an obsessive, machine-like work which will interest any collector of Scriabin and/or the Soviet avant-garde.