# Nikolai Roslavets



## DeepR

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Roslavets

Russian modernist composer who's music was suppressed for a long time. Scriabin was a big influence (he even looks like him a little bit). His music is partially lost or in the process of being restored. 
I'm usually a fairly conservative listener but for some reason I really like his music. Take that etude below, those harmonies, it's like a fever dream...

Some of my favorite pieces so far:

Nocturne (quintet) (1913)





Three Etudes, No. 2 (1914)





Komsomoliya (1928)





I also like his early symphonic poem "In the hours of the new moon" (1912-13) and I'm currently listening to his chamber symphony (1934-1935), which I find harder to get into:
http://www.allmusic.com/album/roslavets-chamber-symphony-in-the-hours-of-the-new-moon-mw0001398840


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## Cosmos

Roslavets is one of my favorite "obscure" composers, whose work I've slowly been getting more into.

I have the same album with the Chamber Symphony and In the Hours of the New Moon. That symphonic poem is one of my favorites, very similar to Scriabin's Poem of Ecstasy. The chamber symphony is good, though I love it more when Roslavets is on his more darker/experimental side, like with the chamber music.

I'm seeking out some chamber music cds for Christmas


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## Grizzled Ghost

I have this nice CD of works for cello and piano:









I like it quite a bit.


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## elgar's ghost

Somewhat tragic that a substantial quantity of Roslavets' manuscripts were apparently hunted down and confiscated or destroyed after his death. I'm not familiar with his surviving orchestral or piano works but much of the available chamber music I've heard (various sonatas for violin, sonatas for cello, piano trios and string quartets) sounds very individual, whether from the late Romantic era or the 'anything goes' 20s. I hope that more of his output is rediscovered and made available before too long.


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## LHB

Wow, I'm shocked there hasn't been a thread for Roslavets yet! He's probably one of my favorite futurist composers. His chamber music and Piano Sonatas are really amazing.


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## DeepR

His first piano sonata is mighty impressive to these ears.





Why can I find only one known recording of Komsomoliya? This mindblowing symphonic poem desperately needs a high quality recording.





Dance of the White Girls for cello and piano. Interesting, beautiful earlier piece.





p.s. I noticed this topic has not been added to the composer index yet.


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## MadMusicist

I came across this thread so I thought I'd bump it for the amazing chamber works of Roslavets. He often sound impassioned, but not romantically so. The flavor is just right for me.


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## Pugg

MadMusicist said:


> I came across this thread so I thought I'd bump it for the amazing chamber works of Roslavets. He often sound impassioned, but not romantically so. The flavour is just right for me.


I did buy a CD once with the piano trio's , didn't work it for me.


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## Guest

I like this one:


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## ahinton

Roslavets was one of the finest Russian composers of his time. Born into a particularly fecund era for Russian composers - within a few years of Myaskovsky, Medtner, Stravinsky, Sabane'ev, Gnessin, Alexandrov _et al_ - he had a most individual voice and came to be regarded as the "Russian Schönberg" rather as Medtner had to live with the description of "Russian Brahms". His comparatively recently discovered Chamber Symphony, which Myaskovsky saw and admired before it disappeared for decades, strikes me as almost akin to what might have been Schönberg's Chamber Symphony No. 1½, to the extent that I cannot help but wonder whether Schönberg himself, who knew Myaskovsky and had momentarily considered moving to Russia at around that time, might have encountered its score, especially as he rather significantly resumed work on his own long then since abandoned Second Chamber Symphony shortly thereafter and soon completed it.

Roslavets was probably among the worst treated of all composers under the Soviet régime in its early days; I understand that Shostakovich and others were under orders never even to mention his name in classes or elsewhere and it would seem from evidence from a variety of sources that Roslavets was at one time officially regarded not even as a "non-person" but as an "un-person", as though he had never existed at all.

His time is now nevertheless coming, not least as a consequence of the fact that, as we now know, by no means as much of his work was destroyed by officialdom as was once thought; what he might have achieved without such searing authoritarian interference hardly bears thinking about.

Anyone interested should also get the Hyperion CD of his two violin concertos, played by the wonderful Alina Ibragimova; the second (albeit the weaker of the two) opens as though the composer could see potential in cast-offs of sketches from Rachmaninoff's Second Symphony - a curious coincidence given that, in the slow third movement of the composer's Chamber Symphony, the piano suddenly takes off by emerging from the proto-Schönbergian atmosphere of its third movement as though launching into a Rachmaninovian cadenza!...

His output is very well worth exploring; go for it


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## Pat Fairlea

Kontrapunctus said:


> I like this one:


Me too. I stumble over bits of Roslavets now and then and have yet to hear a piece by him that has not impressed me.


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## Zhdanov

ahinton said:


> Roslavets was probably among the worst treated of all composers under the Soviet régime


what 'regime'? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Roslavets#Political_persecutions - looks more like a trade union inner squabble: you are merely refused an employment, thats it, happens everywhere; so is it a 'regime' wherever you go?


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## ahinton

Zhdanov said:


> what 'regime'? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Roslavets#Political_persecutions - looks more like a trade union inner squabble: you are merely refused an employment, thats it, happens everywhere; so is it a 'regime' wherever you go?


Does it really? Did I suggest (as you appear to do) that the authorities' treatment of Roslavets centred solely on denial of employment? If so, I think that you could well do with reading rather more about the composer than is offered in the Wiki article, although even that doesn't dismiss the situation as you do! So there was no such régime, then and what was present in its place took no negative interest in the musical life of Russia, then?

You would appear to be well named; is your erstwhile colleague and confederate-in-arms Tikhon a member here as well, by chance?


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## Zhdanov

ahinton said:


> Does it really?


yes, it does.



ahinton said:


> you could well do with reading rather more about the composer than is offered in the Wiki article


feel free to provide a link to that read.



ahinton said:


> So there was no such régime, then and what was present in its place took no negative interest in the musical life of Russia, then?


no, at least not more than elsewhere; you see, wherever you are in the world, you have to *comply*, otherwise you only get problems.


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## ahinton

Zhdanov said:


> no, at least not more than elsewhere; you see, wherever you are in the world, you have to *comply*, otherwise you only get problems.


And so you could provide credible examples, supported by corroborative evidence, that in other countries of various political persuasions throughout the work there have been similar cases of gross mistreatment? Please go ahead and do so. Can you think, for example, of a parallel English example? Alan Bush had his music banned by BBC for a very short time during WWII due to his Communist sympathies as evidenced by his membership of the British Communist Party; that this lasted so short a time was largely down to the intervention of Vaughan Williams, who was nothing of the kind.


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## Pugg

Can we please for once keep political comments out.


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## ahinton

Pugg said:


> Can we please for once keep political comments out.


With respect, the comments concerned relate solely to the treatment of individual composers by the governments of the day, not about the politics of either in general terms; that in Roslavets' case this interfered with his career and gave rise to the official ransacking of his home following his death (with the result that works were undoubtedly lost), cannot be denied and is of importance in terms of the past neglect of an important Russian composer.


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## Zhdanov

ahinton said:


> And so you could provide credible examples, supported by corroborative evidence, that in other countries of various political persuasions throughout the work there have been similar cases of gross mistreatment?


no other country had culture as high level as Soviets had.

so its more a matter of *standards*; when you want high standards, then you pick & choose.


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## ahinton

Zhdanov said:


> no other country had culture as high level as Soviets had.
> 
> so its more a matter of *standards*; when you want high standards, then you pick & choose.


In side-stepping my question, your write instead of opportunities for music education in Soviet Russia which were indeed considerable during much of its existence; that fact, however, does not and indeed cannot atone for the official mistreatment of a number of leading composers there; Stalin himself, then Zhdanov and Khrennikov (the last of whom remained largely unrepentent to the end of his days long after the Soviet régime had collapsed) can hardly be exonerated from their deeds and words against the work of those composers from time to time.

That said, let's please concentrate on the _music_ of Roslavets, more of which is thankfully now known to have survived than was once thought to be the case.


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## EdwardBast

Zhdanov said:


> no other country had culture as high level as Soviets had.
> 
> so its more a matter of *standards*; when you want high standards, then you pick & choose.


So, your argument is that the end justifies the means, including persecution, arbitrary exclusion from employment, and the occasional bullet in the back of the head. We've had this discussion before, when I asked you whether aesthetic standards justified the murder of Meyerhold, the rape and murder of his wife for circulating a petition on his behalf, and the bullet in the back of Isaac Babel's head for portraying one of Stalin's generals in an unflattering light in his Red Cavalry stories. Yes, we all admired the USSR's zeal for high standards in art. I guess Roslavets was lucky, huh?


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## ahinton

EdwardBast said:


> So, your argument is that the end justifies the means, including persecution, arbitrary exclusion from employment, and the occasional bullet in the back of the head. We've had this discussion before, when I asked you whether aesthetic standards justified the murder of Meyerhold, the rape and murder of his wife for circulating a petition on his behalf, and the bullet in the back of Isaac Babel's head for portraying one of Stalin's generals in an unflattering light in his Red Cavalry stories. Yes, we all admired the USSR's zeal for high standards in art. I guess Roslavets was lucky, huh?


Points taken. One might likewise wonder whether _entartete musik_ was just a figment of what might otherwise have passed for the imagination of musicologist on an off-day rather than something that is an historical fact.

Tippett and Stevenson were subjected to official punishment for their respective conscientious objector stances during WWII. the former with a prison sentence and the latter being forced to work on the land under supervision; mercifully, these sentences were each brief and appear to have exerted no discernible impact upon their music or musical careers.

Only Bush was subjected to an actual BBC ban, at around the same time, albeit for what were taken to be his political beliefs rather than for conscientious objection to WWII; this, likewise, was short-lived and ended as a direct consequence of the generous and indignant intervention of Vaughan Williams.

The fate that befell some musicians living and working in Germany and Austria in particular during the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s was far graver than what happened in UK; the persecutions of and fear-mongering dispensed to certain Russian musicians from the late 1920s onwards for many years was more widespread and despicable still. Why otherwise did so many musicians quit Germany in particular in the years leading up to and during WWII and why did so many more try - usually without success - to defect from Soviet Russia?


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## Zhdanov

ahinton said:


> cannot atone for the official mistreatment of a number of leading composers there


no sympathy for them; they knew what they were in for; the USSR being a revolutionary state would not emerge from chaos of the civil war any other way. Bolsheviks and other revolutionaries/reformers should have known better what follows the destruction of Russian Empire and the murder of its tsar. Rachmaninov lost everything because of them; we better sympathise with him.



ahinton said:


> Stalin himself, then Zhdanov and Khrennikov (the last of whom remained largely unrepentent to the end of his days


why Khrennikov had to repent? what to repent of?



ahinton said:


> why did so many more try - usually without success - to defect from Soviet Russia?


they didn't. Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khatchaturan, Maskovsky, Sviridov etc. - no, they didn't. USSR was on ok state that had much more opportunities than the West could offer at the time. Soviet Union should be compared with the West of the period, not as they do these days when comparing it with the West of 1990s'.


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## Zhdanov

EdwardBast said:


> So, your argument is that the end justifies the means, including persecution, arbitrary exclusion from employment


it isn't my argument, this is what you get when build a new state from the ashes of a previous one; and it is rather unfair to hold this against the heritage of new model sate.



EdwardBast said:


> whether aesthetic standards justified the murder of Meyerhold


it wasn't aesthetic standards; why conceal he wrote accusing reports on his friends & rivals to the NKVD and fell victim of his own dirty tricks?



EdwardBast said:


> the rape and murder of his wife for circulating a petition on his behalf


only murdered, not raped, let's not exaggerate - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinaida_Reich#Murder



EdwardBast said:


> the bullet in the back of Isaac Babel's head for portraying one of Stalin's generals in an unflattering light in his Red Cavalry stories.


he got that bullet from those who were no different than him... better shed tears for tsar Nicolas II and his family.


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## ahinton

Zhdanov said:


> no sympathy for them; they knew what they were in for; the USSR being a revolutionary state would not emerge from chaos of the civil war any other way.


Nonsense! Roslavets and Shostakovich, among others, put great faith in this régime; the "good" that it did them is now well documented.



Zhdanov said:


> Bolsheviks and other revolutionaries/reformers should have known better what follows the destruction of Russian Empire and the murder of its tsar. Rachmaninov lost everything because of them; we better sympathise with him.


Much as I do indeed sympathise with Rachmaninoff and others of his contemporaries over this, no one can sensibly and reasonably ascribe blame to its predecessors for what the Soviet authorities did to some of those artists in its supposed care.



Zhdanov said:


> why Khrennikov had to repent? what to repent of?


He didn't "have" to; that was his choice. As to those things for which he might have chosen to repent but didn't, one has only to consider his rôle and how he handled it when he had clout in that régime.



Zhdanov said:


> they didn't. Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khatchaturan, Maskovsky, Sviridov etc. - no, they didn't. USSR was on ok state that had much more opportunities than the West could offer at the time. Soviet Union should be compared with the West of the period, not as they do these days when comparing it with the West of 1990s'.


Try some reasonable transliterative spelling, please! Shostakovich in particular didn't leave Russia because he was a loyal Russian citizen as distinct from a Soviet citizen. Britten offered him a safe house in UK if even he wanted to use it but he never did for that very reason. In Shostakovich's latter days and from then on until the Soviet Union's fortunate if much delayed demise, things were not so bad for musicians because the régime came to decide that it had more important fish to try to fry.


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## Zhdanov

ahinton said:


> Roslavets and Shostakovich, among others, put great faith in this régime; the "good" that it did them is now well documented.


the former just had no luck, the latter got lots of good from Soviet authorities indeed, its well documented.



ahinton said:


> no one can sensibly and reasonably ascribe blame to its predecessors for what the Soviet authorities did to some of those artists in its supposed care.


they had to rule them somehow, otherwise they would end up with 4'33, Madonna, a man rotating his pelvis, those four chaps from a synagogue, Nobel prize for Zimmerman etc.



ahinton said:


> one has only to consider his rôle and how he handled it when he had clout in that régime.


his role was the chairman in an artistic union, thats it.



ahinton said:


> Shostakovich in particular didn't leave Russia because he was a loyal Russian citizen as distinct from a Soviet citizen.


no, that's because he was a stalwart Bolshevik.


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## ahinton

Zhdanov said:


> the former just had no luck, the latter got lots of good from Soviet authorities indeed, its well documented.
> 
> they had to rule them somehow, otherwise they would end up with 4'33, Madonna, a man rotating his pelvis, those four chaps from a synagogue, Nobel prize for Zimmerman etc.
> 
> his role was the chairman in an artistic union, thats it.
> 
> no, that's because he was a stalwart Bolshevik.


.

As I noted earlier, let's have a discussion about Roslavets' MUSIC!


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## DeepR

Right, how about Komsomoliya?






It just leaves me completely flabbergasted. I love it! How did he ever conceive such a thing. And WHY is this the only recording of it?!!


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## DeepR

DeepR said:


> And WHY is this the only recording of it?!!


Ah, but it isn't. Look what I found! It was right there on youtube, in Russian. Didn't see it before. Amazing.


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## MusicSybarite

Some while ago I played Komsomoliya again. This is simply astounding, dramatic like a riot. One of the fiercest pieces I've listened to recently.


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## DeepR

I still prefer the first one of the two versions above. It sounds more aggressive, chaotic and the vocals blend in better.
Amazing, so much happens in a short time that the piece seems longer than it actually is.


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