Nikolay Roslavets was one of the most prominent casualties of the Soviet Union’s artistic policies in the late-1920s and early-1930s. Having carved himself a niche as an uncompromisingly modernist successor to Scriabin, genuinely believing that such a position could harmonize with Bolshevik ideals, he put up with years of critical and political abuse before going to cool his heels in Tashkent, re-emerging after a few years with a chastened ‘acceptable’ style.
Roslavets has a footnote in the history of music theory too. In his idealistic works of the 1910s and 1920s, of which the piano works are fully representative, he developed a system of ‘synthetic chords’, based on Scriabin’s late works but related to the 12-note experiments of Schoenberg and especially Josef Matthias Hauer. Into that melting pot he stirred something of the richness and agility of Ravel’s Gaspard and Miroirs, plus the intellectualism of Busoni. The resulting brew has an odour of over-ripeness and contrivance that not even Marc-Andre Hamelin’s mastery can dispel, but it is undeniably intriguing.
Some of the rhythmic interplay is so intricate as to defeat the typographers in the 1989 edition, and the hieroglyphic proliferation of accidentals includes a triple sharp at one point. But Hamelin finds his way through all this with amazing aplomb. Few are the pianists who would have the patience to decipher the Three Etudes, for instance, never mind to blend their sonorities so finely. The three sonatas on this disc may ultimately be little more than necrophiliac dalliances with Scriabin, but at least we can be confident that these performances do them full justice. In the Five Preludes Roslavets at last seems willing to purge his own luxuriances and cultivate clarity of line.
This finely recorded recital confirms Hamelin’s place as one of the most enterprising and virtuosic performers of our day. If the music hardly qualifies for ‘neglected genius’ status, it nevertheless exists in a powerful and fascinating world of its own.'