Nikolai Roslavets
My undergrad piano professor, David Renner, introduced me to Nikolai Roslavets a few years ago. I finally followed his suggestion and bought Marc-Andre Hamelin’s excellent CD of a few of his piano pieces. Roslavets was dubbed “the Russian Schoenberg” — he dabbled in his own type of serialism. He himself This was (predictably) not to the liking of Soviet authorities. Roslavets’ name became a derogatory term of sorts, used to describe “formalist” music not accessible to the masses. The whole story is lamentably familiar, having been repeated over and over again with many other composers and artists (most famously Shostakovich and Prokofiev.)
Here is my favorite (thusfar) of his works: the first Etude, played by Hamelin.
