The booklet begins with Francis Bacon. In his utopia The New Atlantis of 1624 he describes “sound-houses, where we practise and demonstrate all sounds, and their generation”, harmonies of quarter-tones and lesser slides of sounds, instruments unknown to his readers. Barely three hundred years later, experiments were undertaken in a Russia shaken by revolutionary upheavals that come strikingly close to that vision. Bacon’s knowledge society rested on a central authority; in post-revolutionary Soviet Russia, by contrast, several often short-lived organisations were formed with the stated aim of accelerating social transformation by the most modern means.
One of them was the Association of Contemporary Musicians (ASM). Arthur Vincent Lourié had proposed it as early as 1918; it was founded in 1923, a year after his emigration. Its members saw it not as a political organisation but as a representative body for contemporary composers. In 1924 Mosolov was invited to play his — now lost — third piano sonata at an ASM concert in Moscow; in 1926 he was officially admitted and from then on intensively promoted. In this milieu he came to know the music of Hindemith and Honegger, which would shape his further development.
Mosolov was born on 11 August 1900 in Kiev; in 1904 the family moved to Moscow, where his mother found occasional work as a singer at the Bolshoi Theatre. Her circle of friends from the liberal intelligentsia and their journeys abroad formed his openness to contemporary art early on. He received his first piano lessons from Alexander Shenshin, in 1920–21 played for silent films, and from 1921 to 1925 studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Reinhold Glière and Nikolai Myaskovsky, also attending the piano classes of Grigory Prokofiev and Konstantin Igumnov. At the same time his intransigence showed itself early: suspended from school several times for rude jokes, in 1916 he ran away from home to fight at the front; he greeted the upheaval of 1917 with enthusiasm, served as a volunteer in the Red Army until 1921, was wounded twice and twice decorated for bravery. He met Lenin on three occasions.
It is precisely this biography that makes clear how uncomprehending he was in the face of the later cultural and political attacks. His Iron Foundry movement from Zavod achieved sensational success in 1927, and Mosolov briefly counted as a cultural export of the young Soviet music scene; until the early 1930s he worked as a radio editor. In March 1932 he complained bitterly, in a personal letter to Stalin, about the continual denunciations.
The sonatas on this album all come from his student years: the second in B minor op. 4 (1923/24) in three movements, the last of them headed Allegro tumultuoso, infernale; the single-movement first in C minor op. 3 (1924); the fourth op. 11 (1925), likewise in one movement; and the fifth in D minor op. 12 (1925) in four movements, closing with an Adagio languente e patetico of almost eight minutes. Between them stand the Two Nocturnes op. 15 of 1926. Thomas Günther recorded them from 1 to 5 March 2012 in the chamber music hall of Deutschlandfunk in Cologne, on a Steinway D concert grand; the booklet runs to 60 pages.