I read dozens of books every year. Every once in awhile, I will run across a new book title and get the odd sensation that the author has written a book just for me.
While that doesn't happen often, it has just happened to me again. The Three Apostles of Russian Music by Gregor Tassie is not, as you might guess from the title, about Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Myaskovsky. It is in fact about three composers I focus upon at this blog: Nicolai Roslavets, Gavriil Popov and Alexander Mosolov.
I have only had time so far to read the Introduction and the first chapter of the library copy I managed to get my hands upon, but I can already report that the book is the product of immense research and that Tassie really knows his subject (he knows Russian fluently, he's in touch with all of the top Russian scholars of the three composers, he got help from staff at museums and institutes in Moscow and St. Petersburg, etc. etc.
This is the sort of book in which even the footnotes require careful study. Here is footnote No. 40, which points me to some Myaskovsky works to try: "Myaskovsky's Tenth, Eleventh, Thirteenth symphonies, and Fourth String Quartet did experiment with serialism -- author."
Sounds like an interesting book. I put some Roslavets on Spotify today.
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