Label: Challenge Classics
Format: CD
Barcode: 0608917256826
Catalog number: CC 72568
Releasedate: 07-09-12
Format: CD
Barcode: 0608917256826
Releasedate: 07-09-12
A world premiere recording of the piano cycle "Seven Melodies for the Dial" of Russian composer Vladimir Genin (b. 1958),played by the Russian pianist Olga Domnina. This cycle is dedicated to her!
- A solo debut on Challenge Classics by a renowned Russian pianist!
- A piano cycle written in 2011 by Vladimir Genin, dedicated to Olga Domnina: a world premiere recording!
- In October 2011 she attained international acclaim with the world premiere performance of this cycle
- Olga Domnina is a Gold Medal graduate of the Gnesin Institute of Music in Moscow
- Since moving to London and entering the Royal Academy of Music in 2007, Miss Domnina has been dividing her time between England and Italy
- She has collaborated with such internationally acclaimed artists as the violinists Julian Rachlin and Viktor Tretyakov, the violist Paul Silverthorne and the cellist Thomas Carroll
When the going gets tough, the tough turn to Shakespeare – or so, at least, did the Russian intelligentsia under totalitarianism. To them, Shakespeare personified timelessness “in a good sense,” in the sense of a cultural tablet whereby perennial values and their natural hierarchies were asserted and upheld. This was in stark contrast to the achronicity of their epoch, to timelessness “in the bad sense” of living without time. The notion of time- lessness – in this uniquely modern meaning of an achronic vacuum, rather than of an eternal value – belongs to Alexander Blok, rather as the mo- dern idea of time belongs to Marcel Proust, whose younger contemporary the Russian poet was.
In music, it was Blok’s other contemporary, Alexander Scriabin, who sensed that time,at least in Russia, was at an end. The composer died in 1915, and not for another twenty years, when Dmitry Shostakovich opened Pravda to read that he had been muddle in-stead of music, would the state of “timelessness” prophesied by Blok find an expression in thought or sound.
Georgy Sviridov became a pupil of Shostakovich at the Leningrad Conservatory. 1936 is the nexus of these events, and from there the chronicle of culture leads us on to the music premiered on this recording – if only because, some 30 year later, the composer of Seven Melodies for the Dial, Vladimir Genin, became in his turn a loyal pupil of Shostakovich’s loyal pupil. Thus the Russian intelligentsia’s fear of timelessness, a totalitarian society’s analogue of nature’s horror vacui, migrated from generation to generation.
In music, it was Blok’s other contemporary, Alexander Scriabin, who sensed that time,at least in Russia, was at an end. The composer died in 1915, and not for another twenty years, when Dmitry Shostakovich opened Pravda to read that he had been muddle in-stead of music, would the state of “timelessness” prophesied by Blok find an expression in thought or sound.
Georgy Sviridov became a pupil of Shostakovich at the Leningrad Conservatory. 1936 is the nexus of these events, and from there the chronicle of culture leads us on to the music premiered on this recording – if only because, some 30 year later, the composer of Seven Melodies for the Dial, Vladimir Genin, became in his turn a loyal pupil of Shostakovich’s loyal pupil. Thus the Russian intelligentsia’s fear of timelessness, a totalitarian society’s analogue of nature’s horror vacui, migrated from generation to generation.