Fifty-six years after his death, Roslavets remains little known outside his reputation as a key player in Russian modernism. The present discs, concentrating on the prolific years of the 1920s, reinforce the image of a composer whose theoretical advances are only fitfully conveyed by his music.
The shorter pieces on Ivashkin’s survey give us Roslavets in essence. In Dance of the White Girls, the dreamy opening undulations are channelled through a sequence of harmonic dislocations. Meditation finds repose in the often rhetorical relationship between cello and piano, the capricious central section offsetting the sustained inwardness elsewhere.
Formal structures are ingenious if often reckless. In Piano Trio No 2, Scriabinesque expression is filtered through a Schoenbergian form which undermines the clear binary structure referred to in the booklet-note. Its successor is more restrained, the underlying mood elegiac rather than passionate. The First Cello Sonata achieves a more satisfying formal balance in its integration of four-movement form within a tensile sonata-allegro, its energy amply conveyed by Ivashkin. He brings equal conviction to Cello Sonata No 2, a single-movement exploration of contrast and coherence, and if the impressively wrought opening paragraph (to 5'43) almost pre-empts what follows, the gravity of the discourse is never in doubt.
The Five Preludes are related to the febrile late works of Scriabin, though the latter’s Op 74 Preludes have a concentration which makes Roslavets seem diffuse in comparison. A far cry from the Fourth Piano Trio, whose multi-movement groundplan and thematic rigour find the composer employing advanced harmonic means to more classical formal ends. Yet the first movement’s quirky formal logic, the scherzo’s Bartokian parody, the Lento’s haunted introspection and the finale’s desperately affirmative resolution were hardly designed to appeal to Soviet audiences then enthralled by the latest Western operatic novelties of Berg and Krenek, and stood little chance once Socialist Realism held sway.
The Fontenay Trio bring the poise and incisiveness that distinguish their forays into the classical repertoire, and make a strong case, as do Ivashkin and Lazareva, for this music’s revival. Roslavets seems destined to achieve only a modicum of wider acceptance; though it’s hard to believe this taciturn, disquieting figure would have wanted it any other way