The two best-known things about Alexander Mosolov are that he composed The Iron Foundry in 1928, a Russian-futurist equivalent of Honegger’s Pacific 231, and that he fell from grace spectacularly in the mid 1930s. Forced to abandon his modernist compositional style, he cooled his heels documenting folk-song traditions in Turkmenistan, Kirgizia and the southern republics of Russia until his death in total obscurity in 1973. His music was rediscovered shortly afterwards, and his name now carries the resonance of a martyr.
Mosolov’s piano works from the 1920s are typical of the hothouse Scriabinism which several of his contemporaries cultivated as a progressive line against the forces of proletarian and academic conformism. Character markings such as lugubre, infernale and affanato proclaim that heritage, as does the obsession with static blocks of harmony underpinning swirls of keyboard virtuosity. This is music in a continuous state of becoming, or, if you are allergic to its sweltering climate, a frustrating state of never-quite-getting-there.
Prokofiev heard Mosolov’s music on his visit to Russia in 1927 and declared its composer the most interesting of the young talents he encountered, Shostakovich included. Sure enough, echoes of Mosolov’s intransigent chromaticism can be heard as late as Prokofiev’s famous wartime sonata trilogy, as they can too in both of Shostakovich’s piano sonatas. The slow movement of the Fifth Sonata even brings some extraordinary premonitions of Messiaen; but the would-be-triumphal theme in the finale sticks out like a sore thumb, as does the diatonic theme in the middle of the first movement of the Second Sonata.
As so often, mention of paths to and from a composer immediately suggests his limitations. There is something constraining about the mystical vapours and contrived angularities of Mosolov’s style; certainly no whiff of humour or surprise or transcendence dispels them, as it does with Prokofiev or Shostakovich. It’s difficult to pass such judgements without sounding like a henchman of the Soviet cultural thought-police; but it would simply be wishful thinking to claim that the interest of Mosolov’s creative powers is equal to that of his aesthetic stance and his political fate.
True to the form he has shown in recordings of Stockhausen, Boulez, Ives, Koechlin and others, Herbert Henck offers imposing yet subtly shaded performances, doing ample justice to the intensity of the music. His instrument is richer in tone than Geoffrey Douglas Madge’s tinny 1926 Steinway on his disc of all four extant sonatas (No. 3 is lost) and his touch is more varied without lacking an ounce of conviction. The ECM recording is superior to Etcetera’s for Yuri Lisichenko in precisely the same programme as Henck’s and to Chant du Monde’s for Russudan Khuntsaria; her disc, however, includes the Piano Concerto and in many ways offers the most helpful introduction to Mosolov currently available.'