No aficionado of Soviet music can afford to be without at least one disc of Alexander Mosolov, the composer who achieved double notoriety thanks to some brutalist-modernist scores in the 1920s and to falling foul of the authorities in the high-Stalin era – not for musical reasons but initially for ‘hooliganism’ and then for alleged ‘counter-revolutionary activity’. In fact he was far less of a musical innovator than his reputation might suggest: for instance, his signature piece, ‘The Iron Foundry’, comes straight out of the ‘Procession of the Sage’ from The Rite of Spring, while the Newspaper Announcements follow hard on the heels of Eisler’s Zeitungsabschnitte.

But that’s not to take away from his historical importance. The trenchant assertiveness of his First Piano Sonata clearly left its mark on Shostakovich’s; and many years on, the latter’s Romances on Words from Krokodil added to the debt. While the Piano Concerto might have been better balanced with its short scherzo placed in the middle rather than at the end, it is still an imaginative piece in its own crash-bang-wallop way, not to mention being a rare representative of the Soviet piano concerto genre prior to Shostakovich’s First.

The new Capriccio release closely shadows the 1998 Melodiya/BMG disc listed below. But that and various accounts of the Piano Sonata are rarities, only obtainable at premium prices. In any case, Steffen Schleiermacher has form with Mosolov, as he does with other Soviet repertoire of the time, and he brings an edgy intensity as well as energy to all the pieces involving him. The performance of ‘The Iron Foundry’ may be rather tame compared to some of its competitors, but otherwise the playing on this disc does full justice to the music.