Skrjabin became the father figure of the following generation of composers; his works had an immense catalytic effect. Even Strawinsky could not escape that influence, although he had been making his career in the West since 1910 — his later accounts of himself, however, reveal the intention of distancing himself from the model. The fourth volume sets both great names beside the younger composers and thus directs attention to the intellectual conditions in which the experiments of this series took place.
From Skrjabin the programme takes the Deux Morceaux Op. 57 of 1909, the Deux Danses Op. 73 and the Cinq Préludes Op. 74 of 1914 and the Sonata No. 7 “White Mass” Op. 64 of 1911 — works from the late phase in which his Symbolist sphere of expression fused with a constructivist, Futurist method of composition. Strawinsky is represented by the Piano-Rag-Music of 1919.
In the two younger composers the kinship with Skrjabin emerges more clearly. From Nikolai Roslavets come the Prélude à la mémoire d’Arkady Abaza of 1915, the Deux Compositions of the same year and the Cinq Préludes of 1919 to 1922; from Sergei Protopopov the three-movement Sonata No. 1 Op. 1 of 1920 to 1922. The musical triangle between Skrjabin, Boleslav Yavorsky and Protopopov is, Thomas Günther writes, one of the most fascinating and strangest episodes in recent music history.
Yavorsky had begun developing his theory while still studying with Sergei Taneyev and published it in 1908 as The Structure of Musical Speech; its central idea, the Russian “ladovyj ritm”, can only approximately be rendered as “modal rhythm” or “theory of gravity”. It rests on a twelve-note scale whose individual notes are entirely equal, each of them able to become the keynote of a sound complex; unlike the harmonic and contrapuntal theories of Western provenance, the melodic organisation here depends on interval ratios and the movements of gravity that arise from them. Protopopov, who had first studied medicine and came to Yavorsky in 1913, presented his own extensive Elements of Musical Speech in 1930 — his three piano sonatas are the compositional proof of that theory. Stalin’s change of cultural course put an end to it; between 1934 and 1936 Protopopov was interned in labour camps.
A bonus track sets the final point and arches back to the first volume: a second, somewhat shorter version of Nikolai Obukhov’s Adorons Christ — Fragment du troisième et dernier Testament, as a world premiere recording and additionally produced in 3D binaural stereo. Thomas Günther, pianist and teacher at the Folkwang-Hochschule in Essen, thus concludes his four-part excursion through the repertoire of Russian composers from the intellectual orbit of Futurism; he first encountered these works in 1983 at the Berliner Festwochen. The recording was made at the end of February and the beginning of March 2014 in the chamber music hall of Deutschlandfunk in Cologne. The series received the 2017 ECHO Klassik and was nominated for the Jahrespreis 2016 of the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik.