Nikolai Roslavets - Piano Sonata No. 1

Composer: Nikolai Andreevich Roslavets (4 January 1881 -- 23 August 1944)
Performer: Irina Emeliantseva
Year of recording: 2008

Piano Sonata No. 1, written in 1914.

Roslavets' musical thought and his efforts to “express my inner self, which dreamt of new worlds of sound never heard before”, basically date back to the 1910s, which were influenced by Scriabin and the symphonic poem. At that time, this gifted offspring of peasant stock (Roslavets began by teaching himself the violin) was completing his degree at Moscow Conservatory, where he was awarded a silver medal. He then increasingly turned his back on the academic routine to pursue his own experimental concert programs paths.

Like Schoenberg, Roslavets was interested in developing a new approach to working within the total chromatic sound world. However, his work is more closely connected with the late compositions of Scriabin. Indeed, even though Roslavets claimed independence from the influence of Scriabin, his synthetic chord technique has much in common with the latter’s late harmonic practice. Noticeable also is a similarity in the pianistic style of these two composers. Many figurations and textures in this 1st piano sonata are highly reminiscent of parts of Scriabin's 5th, 7th, 8th sonata and of the Poème-Nocturne. Later piano sonatas would be more original, where Roslavets opened up from the late-Scriabin sound world. One might say that Roslavets forged a modernist, constructivist expression from the innovations of Scriabin’s mystical legacy.

A peculiar bit of trivia: there are a few rare triple flats in this composition, you can see them on the sheet at about 8:11.

While scores of all of Roslavets' piano pieces appeared in print during his lifetime, the early Piano Sonata No. 1 (1914) and Piano Sonata No. 2 (1916) existed only in manuscript form until 1990 when they were first published in Moscow. The 3rd and 4th piano sonatas are lost altogether unfortunately.