Thursday, July 14, 2022

Sarah Rothenberg's historic album

 


Perhaps the first "Russian Futurist" piano album, Sarah Rothenberg's 1992 album Rediscovering the Russian Avant-Garde (1912-1925) remains important both as an excellent recording and as a pathbreaking work which led the way for many other recordings.

Rothenberg is a fine piano player, and her recordings of Mosolov's fourth and fifth piano sonatas persists as some of the best renditions of those two works. Whenever I listen to this album, I also particularly enjoy her performance of Nikolai Roslavetz' "Prelude." Alex Ross called it a "superb recital" in the New York Times back in 1994, and I have absolutely agree. 

The review of the album at Allmusic, written by Uncle Dave Lewis, points out the importance of the recording in helping to revive interest in almost forgotten composers: "Featuring pianist Sarah Rothenberg, this collection practically introduced the subgenre of Russian futurist music to the market; even the first Russian recordings of composers such as Roslavets and Mosolov on Le Chant du Monde did not appear until a couple of years later."

The album is available at the Freegal public library music streaming service

This album and an excellent Yuri Favorin recording covers a lot of the Russian piano music from early in the 20th century that you might want to know. 


1 comment:

  1. Thank you for sharing this. I found the album on Amazon Music, but I have not listened to it yet.

    ReplyDelete

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