Youtubeko deskribapena:
Piano: Anthony Jakob
Mosolov is the archetypal futurist composer. His most famous work, the ballet Zavod (The Iron Foundry) attempts to recreate the sounds of a working factory, a long way from Tschaikovsky's traditional 'bourgeois' ballet; something a lot closer to the interests of the proletariat, or working class. This encourages us to draw a parallel with other futurist artists of the day, most notably Kazimir Malevich, whose abstract paintings often depicted peasants and workers.
In the late 1920s, Mosolov complained of being constantly berated by his peers and his music was repressed by the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM) for writing being excessively inaccessible and pessimistic. He even called upon Stalin for support in his work, but his music was banned from 1929 onwards, and in 1936, he found himself expelled from the Composers' Union. He then voluntarily moved to the Uzbek and Tajik republics to collect folk tunes, but was soon arrested for "counter-revolutionary activities" and sentenced to 8 years in the Gulag labour camp.
Fortunately, his fellow composers managed to secure his release just 8 months later on the grounds of his "outstanding creative ability", although his clashes with the soviet state clearly left their mark on his music, which now bore very little resemblance to the daring avant-gardism of his youth.
His fourth Sonata (1925) is one of his boldest moments, contrasting extreme dynamics and registers - often covering the full breadth of the piano within a matter of seconds. The piece is also notable for an extreme dissonance, of the sort rarely seen in Russia at the time. However, the piece is strung together by a very slow lyrical line, almost frozen in time. The extreme contrasts call back the works of Natalia Goncharova, whose paintings depicted the same image at different points in time to give the illusion of movement. Here, there is certainly no illusion to the movement, but a feeling of different timeframes moving in parallel permeates the piece.
