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Nikolai Roslavets

1881–1944 · Ukraine

Nikolai Roslavets (1881–1944) was one of the most original and significant Ukrainian composers of the early 20th century. Born in Dushatin to a rural peasant family, he was first exposed to music through his uncle, a folk fiddler, before receiving formal training from Arkady Abaza and being accepted to the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied composition and violin, graduating in 1912. At the wake of the October Revolution he stood at the forefront of Moscow’s avant-garde musical scene, loosely associated with the Russian Futurists, and invented a new compositional system built on “synthetic chords” — groups of six to eight pitch classes guiding the symmetric distances of chord-paths, a system he would later liken to Schoenberg’s emancipation of dissonance. His early-period piano miniatures (1914–1919) are reminiscent of Scriabin’s late works, while his middle period (1919–1924) breaks further from that initial symmetric system. This biography is sourced from UCMF’s own 2020 festival program notes and paper abstracts (no dedicated ucmfnyc.com profile page exists for him).

ChamberVocalPiano miniatures

Performed at UCMF

Meditation for Cello and Piano

UCMF 2020 · Music and Revolution in Ukraine · Feb 29 · 1919–1924 · Chamber

from Roslavets’s middle period (1919–1924); Valeriya Sholokhova, cello; Yuliya Basis, piano

Performed by Valeriya Sholokhova (Cello), Yuliya Basis (Piano)

Meditation for Cello [Razdum’ye] comes from Roslavets’ middle period (1919–1924). Although the piece is based on various transpositions of the same synthetic chord, it also takes liberties for expressive purposes. The work can be divided into four sections, with A sections featuring a lyrical cello melody both beginning and ending the work. The inner two sections maintain the same synthetic harmonies, but their character and textures differ strikingly. The B section is exuberant, an immediate contrast to the meditative A section. The C section that follows is yet again different: you will hear some intricate imitative polyphony with a very distinctive rhythmic profile, a subject triggered by the piano, played in octaves. Listen for the wonderful dialogue between the piano and the cello parts as they pass this subject from one another. The imitative texture of the C section is unexpected and unusual for Roslavets’s compositional writing — perhaps he pays homage to his education at the Moscow Conservatory, where he composed hundreds of fugues. The piece fades away with the meditative A section, the cello sustaining an interval of a perfect fifth. (Written by Inessa Bazayev)

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