Roslavets - Piano Trio No. 3 (Part 1/2)

Part one of the Third Piano Trio (1921)

Among Roslavets' vast compositional output is a hefty corpus of high-quality chamber works, which Jonathan Powell believes to be "the single most impressive contribution to chamber music by an early 20th-century Russian composer." Indeed, I infinitely prefer Roslavets' powerful and angst-ridden chamber compositions to those of any other Soviet composer.

Nikolai Roslavets (1881-1944) is sometimes called the "Russian Schoenberg" and was certainly the first Russian composer to use a system of tone organization similar to Schoenberg's serialism. Before the 1917 revolution, Roslavets was regarded as a cutting-edge composer comparable to Scriabin. Interestingly, Marc-Andre Hamelin describes Roslavets's music as "Scriabin on acid." After the revolution and the formation of the RAPM (Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians), Roslavets was criticized and harrassed for his modernism. In the late 1920s, he left the Communist Party and in 1931 moved to Tashkent. There he conducted for a music theater and composed simple pieces in accordance with Socialist Realism. He died in obscurity and his name and music was mostly forgotten until the 1970s.

Artwork by Alfred Kubin: (1) "Every Night We are Haunted by a Dream"

Category:

Music

Tags:

• roslavets
• scriabin
• feinberg
• mosolov
• shostakovich
• prokofiev

[BubbaFrench]

Music is great, but What ARE these AWFUL pictures???????

[Hexameron]

Well, they are considered high art from the visionary symbolist and expressionist, Alfred Kubin (1877-1969), who happens to be my favorite artist; perhaps I chose provocative works, but the first in this video is one of his masterpieces.

I find Roslavets' chamber music dark, brooding, and eerie; the artwork seems fitting to my mind. I am slowly acquiring scores of Roslavets' chamber music and will one day in the far future (perhaps in a year) take all of these down and reupload with score.

[inafantasy]

Somewhere around 3:50 into it, for a moment or two, the artwork came to life through the song. It was quite intense, and fitting.

[lovesGenet]

the art fits these brooding eerie works..Im beginning to appreciate Roslavets more and more. The period between the 2 wars has a lot of tentative essays into moods.It had to be a diificult time ..Roslavets uses conventional forms repetition ,motifs so he is not outlandish .He perfectly describes how many artists must have felt their world at this time.Schonberg makes more and more sense when u get to know this period and what it tells us about ourselves now.

[iHateAmericanCinema]

@Hexameron Don't take down the pictures, they fit very well with the music. As you say: "they capture the dark, brooding, and eerie qualities of the music". They are very iconoclastic for the time they were painted, and fit the nature and magnitude of Roslavets' works.

[ytkarl7777]

"Cause this music is really a big source of fear, angst and however we call that, horror maybe??"

No, I hear beauty. Some brooding maybe, but mostly beauty. Thank you for posting.

[mikejr41387]

@Hexameron i love the pictures.... they go perfectly with the music!! please dont replace them

[TheHumansight]

love the piece and the artwork.

[BubbaFrench]

Thank you, )))

I wonder if the score will be even more scaring))))

Oh, btw, if you know that early soviet music so good, could you answer me a question?

It's interesting, how later composers reacted to such pieces, i mean Shostakovisch, and maybe Schnittke?

Cause this music is really a big source of fear, angst and however we call that, horror maybe?? hehe