Roslavets : Violin Concertos No. 1 & 2

Alina Ibragimova: violin; BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Ilan Volkov: conductor

Nikolay Roslavets (1880–1944): Violin Concerto No 1 (1925); Violin Concerto No 2 1936

As late as 1982 Soviet musicologists claiming any significance for Nikolay Roslavets were vigorously suppressed. Only in 1990 was his unmarked grave identified. How many scores were lost when his flat was ransacked just after his death in 1944? The ruthless vengeance of a reactionary proletariat—branding Roslavets, himself born of peasant stock and a fervent 1917 revolutionary, a mere pedlar of bourgeois ‘art for art’s sake’—has fortunately now given way to a gradual recognition of the very real significance of this ‘Russian Schoenberg’. Hyperion has played an important part in the composer’s contemporary rehabilitation, with a benchmark recording of some orchestral works performed by Ilan Volkov and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. The same performers are joined here by the brilliant young violinist Alina Ibragimova.
Roslavets’s Violin Concerto No 1 was thought to exist only in piano reduction form until 1989 when the full score was unearthed in the archives of the State Music Publishers in Moscow. It is an ambitious work, laid out on a large scale. Roslavets’s mastery of a leaner symphonic idiom, virtuosic and elegant, is immediately apparent. It ranks as one of the most important Russian works of its era.
Violin Concerto No 2 was completed in 1936, and was written shortly after the composer’s remarkable Chamber Symphony of 1934–5 (recorded on Hyperion CDA67484). Thus it belongs to the period following Roslavets’s return to Moscow from Uzbekistan, when he seems to have been trying to re-establish his reputation as a composer of substantial works, but after the notorious Pravda denunciations of Shostakovich and musical modernism in January 1936 he probably felt it stood little chance of performance. Since then it has remained in total obscurity until very recently, and these notes were heard for the first time in Glasgow’s City Hall in January 2008—the performance on the present disc is in fact the world premiere.
Alina Ibragimova performs these two concertos with the same insouciance and passion that characterized her playing on her debut CD for Hyperion:
Praise for HARTMANN Concerto Funebre Compact Disc CDA67547 ‘She is Russian, 23, and a scorchingly good violinist. This is her CD recital debut; always a testing occasion, but especially for young violinists. What repertoire should be chosen? … Ibragimova has chosen the third route, towards serious and neglected repertory … Hartmann had his youthful iconoclasms, but the agony of the Second World War brought out the tragic artist in him … [Concerto funebre] To the adagio section she brings passion without mawkishness; and the control wielded at high altitudes is phenomenal … Ibragimova is marvellously sturdy and exact, especially when making perilous leaps from exposed places. And she plays with such commitment and feeling … as for her next disc, the doors are wide open. But whatever Ibragimova plays, it’ll be worth hearing’ (The Times) ’Crisply and incisively argued … musicianship of the highest order’ (International Record Review)

Price: $19.98