Arthur Vincent Lourié, of Sephardic descent and born Naum Izrailevich Luriye, was born in St Petersburg in 1892, grew up in a prosperous household and spent his youth in Odessa. In 1909 he entered the St Petersburg Conservatory, joining the piano class of Maria Barinova, a pupil of Busoni, and the composition class of Alexander Glazunov. In 1913 he converted to Catholicism and adopted the artistic name Arthur Vincent out of reverence for Schopenhauer and van Gogh. In 1918 Lunacharsky appointed him music commissar; in 1922 he used an official trip to Berlin to defect, and in 1924 settled in Paris, in close contact with Igor Strawinsky.
Among the Futurists’ attempts at finding a voice is Lourié’s essay “On Music of Higher Chromaticism” of 1915, which proposes additional accidentals so that quarter tones can be written in conventional notation — he never used them himself. His early piano works trace the path of the visual arts and literature towards abstraction, concentration and fragmentation, as far as the Cubo-Futurist trans-media of the Formes en l’air. Over his life, Thomas Günther writes, a sentence from Busoni’s Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music might stand: the task of the creator is to make laws and not to obey laws. The turn towards religious and mystical subjects came later, in Parisian exile and in the circle of the philosopher Jacques Maritain; in 1940 Lourié fled the Nazis to America, where the music scene remained largely closed to him. He died in Princeton in 1966.
The biography of Sergei Protopopov, born in Moscow in 1893, remains fragmentary. After a degree in medicine he began to study music theory with Boleslav Yavorsky in 1913; his teacher’s original ideas marked his entire work as composer and theorist. In the 1920s he was close to the Association for Contemporary Music, which was able to publish his compositions through an agreement with Universal Edition in Vienna. He edited his teacher’s writings, published an extensive theoretical work of his own, directed the chorus of the Bolshoi Theatre and taught at the First Moscow State Polytechnic for Music.
After the civil war, musicians organised themselves in competing associations. The Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians, founded in 1923, campaigned ever more aggressively against progressive composers from the late 1920s; on 23 April 1932 all associations were dissolved and replaced by a central composers’ union, and socialist realism became binding. Thomas Günther recorded the programme in February 2010 in the chamber music hall of Deutschlandfunk in Cologne. The series received the 2017 ECHO Klassik in the category of solo recording of the 20th/21st century and was nominated for the Jahrespreis 2016 of the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik.