The three composers on this SACD belong to the generation of Russian artists who emerged amid the revolutionary upheaval of the 1910s. Their chief inspiration was Alexander Skrjabin, who had broken through to atonality around 1909/10 and derived both harmony and melody from a single sound centre, the “mystic” chord. After a few years of relative freedom, the disciplining of the “revolutionary” composers began around 1929; those who had emigrated after 1917 found isolation in the West. This repertoire has been rediscovered since the 1970s, in Germany above all thanks to Juan Allende-Blin. In 1983 he engaged Thomas Günther for the concert series “Symbolismus – Futurismus” at the Berlin Festival, where Günther already played Protopopov’s Sonatas Nos. 2 and 3 and Wyschnegradsky’s Etude sur le Carré Magique Sonore Op. 40.
Nikolaj Obuchov, born in Kursk in 1892 and trained in St Petersburg, arrived around 1915, independently of Schönberg, at twelve-tone harmonic complexes, which he wrote down in a simplified notation of his own. From 1919 he lived in Paris, supported by Maurice Ravel, and worked on the vast oratorio “Livre de Vie”, which remained unfinished. His pieces of 1915 and 1916 are aphoristically brief and range dynamically from pppppp to ffff: Conversion tells in four miniatures of the purification of a criminal soul, Icone strikes an explicitly religious note for the first time, and Création de l’Or I and II recall Debussy’s études.
Günther places the late pieces of the 1940s in the orbit of “Livre de Vie”: their titles come from Eastern Orthodox mysticism, and their form is built from “cells” of harmonic complexes. The principal work, Adorons Christ – Fragment du troisième et dernier Testament, is based on the Revelation of St John; after a “flash of lightning” and a “clap of thunder” come sections such as Immolation de l’Agneau and Rédemption, until three chromatic clusters in the highest register bring the close. In pianistic terms, Günther writes, the piece almost bursts the bounds of the possible.
Ivan Wyschnegradsky, who settled in Paris in 1923, worked with quarter-tones and other microintervals from 1918 onwards. His Deux Préludes pour Piano Op. 2 of 1916 still have a late-Romantic colouring but already show a masterly command of polyrhythm. The semitonal Etude sur le Carré Magique Sonore Op. 40, dated July 1957, is based on a “magic square” of six bars that yields the same sequence whether read horizontally or vertically; in it the major seventh takes over the role of the octave. Sergej Protopopov, a pupil of the theorist Boleslav Javorskij, was held in labour camps from 1934 to 1936. His single-movement II. Sonata Op. 5 of 1924 draws its material from Javorskij’s theory of the rhythm of keys; harder and more block-like than Skrjabin’s music, it bears the performance marking minaccioso.
Thomas Günther recorded the programme from 1 to 4 November 2008 in the Kammermusiksaal of Deutschlandfunk in Cologne, in co-production with Deutschlandfunk. The SACD was released in 2009 as the first of four volumes in the series; besides Günther’s commentary on the works, the booklet contains biographies of the composers by Mark Ziegler. The series was nominated for the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik (Jahrespreis 2016) and in 2017 received an ECHO Klassik in the category of solo recording of 20th/21st-century music.