(2026) Gubaïdulina - Shostakovich - Bolens: Rosanoff, Shaikin, Kaskiv, Chkourindina, Pia
Category(ies): Chamber Modern Opera vocal Piano
Instrument(s): Cello Piano Violin
Vocal(s): Soprano
Main Composer: Various composers (see collections)
CD set: 1
Catalog N°:
CD 3164
Release: 09.10.2026
EAN/UPC: 7619931316420
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This album is now on repressing. Pre-order it at a special price now.
CHF 18.50
This album is no longer available on CD.
This album has not been released yet.
Pre-order it at a special price now.
CHF 18.50
This album is no longer available on CD.
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[Access programme texts, as well as the lyrics and translations of the melodies here]
Correspondences: a few words on the works gathered here
“The battle for freedom of thought is the most important task of our lives.” - Sofia Gubaïdulina (1991)
“If music were to leave us, what then would become of our world?” - Alexander Blok (1909)
This recording brings together a late masterpiece by Dmitri Shostakovich - the Seven Romances on Poems by Alexander Blok (1967) - and Sofia Gubaidulina’s first published work: Phacelia (Фацелия in Russian). Composed in 1956, while the young woman was still a student at the Moscow Conservatory, this vocal cycle also exists in an orchestral version, which has remained in manuscript. Recorded here for the first time in its version with piano, the score reveals an extraordinary talent, confirmed by the Chaconne of 1962, another piece written at the dawn of an immense career (Sofia Gubaïdulina passed away in March 2025, at the age of 93). A new work by the Geneva composer Nicolas Bolens completes this programme, imagined by the singer Larissa Rosanoff. Also set to a poem by Alexander Blok, the song Zvenia (Resonating) places the recording under the sign of the affinities between poetic intuition and nature, music and spirituality, art and freedom of thought.
Continuity
“From the very beginning, I have been following the same path”, Gubaidulina said in 2016, looking back over her work. “My aim has always been to listen to the resonance of the world, the resonance of my own soul, and to explore their encounter, their divergence or, on the contrary, their resemblance. [...] What I am seeking today is more or less what I was already writing when I was young. At that time I had composed a work entitled Phacelia; well, even now, it is the same thing. I continue to seek the truth of my soul, and the way it resonates with what I hear, with the sound of the world.”
On several occasions the composer described this cycle as the inaugural piece of a catalogue in which, beyond its constant evolution through encounters and experiments, she saw no real rupture. “I am fond of this cycle, because it contains, in sketch form, ideas that I developed subsequently”, she says in an interview with the musicologist Enzo Restagno. Other scores from her youth have not been preserved, judged to be preparatory works not worthy of enduring posterity. Phacelia, by contrast, holds a particular place in the career of a composer who embodied resistance to the stifling of artists’ voices, in the era of Socialist Realism and of the State’s stranglehold on every sphere of public life.
Flowers, Feathers and Birds
The prominence in Phacelia of the theme of nature, and of humankind’s relationship with its environment, certainly explains the composer’s interest in the eponymous text by Mikhail Prishvin (1873-1954). An agronomist by training, a geographer and a naturalist, Prishvin is known in particular for his travel writing and his short stories for children. Defying classification, his collection Phacelia is made up of a multitude of very brief chapters, out of which the reader is invited to piece together a fragmented narrative, strewn with philosophical reflections and botanical observations.
Prishvin’s narrator, a young agronomist, comes across a meadow of flowers called phacelias while on mission in the countryside, with a whole world of life buzzing around them. Marvelling at the sight, he compares the plant’s slender stamens to birds’ feathers: “It seemed as though blue birds, having come to spend the night [in the field], had left behind the light trace of their feathers.” Associated with absence (the birds have vanished), the flower comes to symbolise the loss of a beloved woman. Further on in the text the metaphor takes on other colourings, as the narrator attempts to transform his melancholy into a surge of empathy for the world.
Prishvin’s autobiographical mosaic, at once private diary, short story and essay, hardly seemed predestined for a musical setting: Gubaïdulina’s choice therefore proves original and personal from the outset. Drawing extracts from chapters that are by turns epic (“The Desert”), lyrical-philosophical (“Blue Feathers” or “The River under the Clouds”), together with small scenes that are humorous (“The Blossom of the Rosehip”), childlike (“The First Flower”) or enchanted (“The Aeolian Harp”), the young woman composes a cycle full of freshness and contrast, underpinned by great emotional force and a remarkable sense of construction.
Secret Signs
Shostakovich’s Seven Romances on Poems by Alexander Blok, Opus 127, likewise occupy a particular place in the composer’s career. Compelled to spend several periods in hospital during 1966 following a heart attack, and suffering alarming symptoms of paralysis in his right hand, Shostakovich went through a long period of silence. Making the most of the solitude imposed on him by his doctors, he reread the poetry of Alexander Blok (1880-1921), an author linked to the Russian Symbolist movement whom he had long admired. Close contact with this visionary poet was to give the composer a new impetus.
Subtitled Vocal and Instrumental Suite, his new cycle calls for a trio of piano, violin and cello. The instruments are introduced first separately, then in pairs, before being brought together in the final number:
“Music”. There is no doubt as to the autobiographical nature of this dedication, the title being the composer’s own. Earlier in the cycle, Shostakovich had brought in the piano, his own instrument, for the portrait of Gamayun (No. 2).
In this celebrated poem of 1899, Blok had already lent allegorical depth to the prophetic bird of Slavic mythology, with its folded wings. In Opus 127, Shostakovich represents its impossible flight musically through a strange scale, which climbs with difficulty out of the low register of the piano. This apocalyptic and crepuscular song merges with the composer’s own voice; it foreshadows the tragic events that will come to pass later, with “The Storm” (No. 5).
Studding his cycle with premonitions and echoes, Shostakovich builds an exceptionally accomplished dramaturgy. As so often with him, intertextuality also multiplies the levels of reading, the better to set the intimate and the universal in dialogue. His use of a twelve-tone row in “Secret Signs” (No. 6) thus gives musical form to the hermeneutic gesture of deciphering, in an oneiric context fostered by archaising and mysterious writing: the voices enter in canon. Linked to the European avant-gardes of the early 20th century, such procedures were held to be decadent by Soviet ideology; in quoting them, the composer introduces a subversive gesture, one that inaugurates a new phase in his creative journey.
Chaconne and Passacaglia: Final Correspondences
Around the same time, Sofia Gubaidulina was also taking an interest in the principles of serialism, which she treated in a flexible, non-academic manner. Her experiments in this field, her use of fixed forms established by learned tradition (the Chaconne of 1962, or the Piano Sonata of 1965), her curiosity and openness (she was as interested in electronic music as in improvisation on folk instruments from non- European traditions), and finally her openly professed religious faith were hardly calculated to please the censors. Despite the relative relaxation of the Party’s cultural policy after Stalin’s death, the young woman ran into difficulties with the notorious “Union of Composers”, which banned the performance of her works in concert from 1970 onwards. That same body had made Shostakovich tremble more than once, with its repeated accusations of “formalism”.
The Chaconne included in this recording is a fine illustration of Gubaïdulina’s independence of mind and of her refusal to bow to the aesthetic requirements advocated by the dominant ideology. Chromatic, with hints of polytonality and a touch of whole-tone scale, this virtuoso piece summons the idiom of fugue and counterpoint, blending a tribute to Bach with an exploration of the piano’s sonorities that passes through sharply contrasted expressive and stylistic worlds. Close to the passacaglia, the chaconne calls on a so-called “obstinate” bass, which turns cyclically upon itself through successive variations. Shostakovich too was very fond of this form, which he used regularly for its sorrowful connotation: thus in Opus 127 the “sleeping city” plunged into darkness (No. 4) is composed as a passacaglia.
“I wish you to follow your own ‘wrong path’”, the composer had whispered to Gubaïdulina as the young woman was completing her composition degree in 1963, in the face of criticism from several members of the jury. Recounting this memorable episode many years later, Gubaïdulina added: “Sometimes someone utters a single word, but it proves decisive and illuminates the path of a whole lifetime.”
Mathilde Reichler
Translation: Michelle Bulloch – Musitext
[Access programme texts, as well as the lyrics and translations of the melodies here]
Aleksandr Shaikin piano
Larissa Rosanoff soprano
Irina Chkourindina piano
Oleg Kaskiv violin
David Pia cello
(2026) Gubaïdulina - Shostakovich - Bolens: Rosanoff, Shaikin, Kaskiv, Chkourindina, Pia - CD 3164
[Access programme texts, as well as the lyrics and translations of the melodies here]
Correspondences: a few words on the works gathered here
“The battle for freedom of thought is the most important task of our lives.” - Sofia Gubaïdulina (1991)
“If music were to leave us, what then would become of our world?” - Alexander Blok (1909)
This recording brings together a late masterpiece by Dmitri Shostakovich - the Seven Romances on Poems by Alexander Blok (1967) - and Sofia Gubaidulina’s first published work: Phacelia (Фацелия in Russian). Composed in 1956, while the young woman was still a student at the Moscow Conservatory, this vocal cycle also exists in an orchestral version, which has remained in manuscript. Recorded here for the first time in its version with piano, the score reveals an extraordinary talent, confirmed by the Chaconne of 1962, another piece written at the dawn of an immense career (Sofia Gubaïdulina passed away in March 2025, at the age of 93). A new work by the Geneva composer Nicolas Bolens completes this programme, imagined by the singer Larissa Rosanoff. Also set to a poem by Alexander Blok, the song Zvenia (Resonating) places the recording under the sign of the affinities between poetic intuition and nature, music and spirituality, art and freedom of thought.
Continuity
“From the very beginning, I have been following the same path”, Gubaidulina said in 2016, looking back over her work. “My aim has always been to listen to the resonance of the world, the resonance of my own soul, and to explore their encounter, their divergence or, on the contrary, their resemblance. [...] What I am seeking today is more or less what I was already writing when I was young. At that time I had composed a work entitled Phacelia; well, even now, it is the same thing. I continue to seek the truth of my soul, and the way it resonates with what I hear, with the sound of the world.”
On several occasions the composer described this cycle as the inaugural piece of a catalogue in which, beyond its constant evolution through encounters and experiments, she saw no real rupture. “I am fond of this cycle, because it contains, in sketch form, ideas that I developed subsequently”, she says in an interview with the musicologist Enzo Restagno. Other scores from her youth have not been preserved, judged to be preparatory works not worthy of enduring posterity. Phacelia, by contrast, holds a particular place in the career of a composer who embodied resistance to the stifling of artists’ voices, in the era of Socialist Realism and of the State’s stranglehold on every sphere of public life.
Flowers, Feathers and Birds
The prominence in Phacelia of the theme of nature, and of humankind’s relationship with its environment, certainly explains the composer’s interest in the eponymous text by Mikhail Prishvin (1873-1954). An agronomist by training, a geographer and a naturalist, Prishvin is known in particular for his travel writing and his short stories for children. Defying classification, his collection Phacelia is made up of a multitude of very brief chapters, out of which the reader is invited to piece together a fragmented narrative, strewn with philosophical reflections and botanical observations.
Prishvin’s narrator, a young agronomist, comes across a meadow of flowers called phacelias while on mission in the countryside, with a whole world of life buzzing around them. Marvelling at the sight, he compares the plant’s slender stamens to birds’ feathers: “It seemed as though blue birds, having come to spend the night [in the field], had left behind the light trace of their feathers.” Associated with absence (the birds have vanished), the flower comes to symbolise the loss of a beloved woman. Further on in the text the metaphor takes on other colourings, as the narrator attempts to transform his melancholy into a surge of empathy for the world.
Prishvin’s autobiographical mosaic, at once private diary, short story and essay, hardly seemed predestined for a musical setting: Gubaïdulina’s choice therefore proves original and personal from the outset. Drawing extracts from chapters that are by turns epic (“The Desert”), lyrical-philosophical (“Blue Feathers” or “The River under the Clouds”), together with small scenes that are humorous (“The Blossom of the Rosehip”), childlike (“The First Flower”) or enchanted (“The Aeolian Harp”), the young woman composes a cycle full of freshness and contrast, underpinned by great emotional force and a remarkable sense of construction.
Secret Signs
Shostakovich’s Seven Romances on Poems by Alexander Blok, Opus 127, likewise occupy a particular place in the composer’s career. Compelled to spend several periods in hospital during 1966 following a heart attack, and suffering alarming symptoms of paralysis in his right hand, Shostakovich went through a long period of silence. Making the most of the solitude imposed on him by his doctors, he reread the poetry of Alexander Blok (1880-1921), an author linked to the Russian Symbolist movement whom he had long admired. Close contact with this visionary poet was to give the composer a new impetus.
Subtitled Vocal and Instrumental Suite, his new cycle calls for a trio of piano, violin and cello. The instruments are introduced first separately, then in pairs, before being brought together in the final number:
“Music”. There is no doubt as to the autobiographical nature of this dedication, the title being the composer’s own. Earlier in the cycle, Shostakovich had brought in the piano, his own instrument, for the portrait of Gamayun (No. 2).
In this celebrated poem of 1899, Blok had already lent allegorical depth to the prophetic bird of Slavic mythology, with its folded wings. In Opus 127, Shostakovich represents its impossible flight musically through a strange scale, which climbs with difficulty out of the low register of the piano. This apocalyptic and crepuscular song merges with the composer’s own voice; it foreshadows the tragic events that will come to pass later, with “The Storm” (No. 5).
Studding his cycle with premonitions and echoes, Shostakovich builds an exceptionally accomplished dramaturgy. As so often with him, intertextuality also multiplies the levels of reading, the better to set the intimate and the universal in dialogue. His use of a twelve-tone row in “Secret Signs” (No. 6) thus gives musical form to the hermeneutic gesture of deciphering, in an oneiric context fostered by archaising and mysterious writing: the voices enter in canon. Linked to the European avant-gardes of the early 20th century, such procedures were held to be decadent by Soviet ideology; in quoting them, the composer introduces a subversive gesture, one that inaugurates a new phase in his creative journey.
Chaconne and Passacaglia: Final Correspondences
Around the same time, Sofia Gubaidulina was also taking an interest in the principles of serialism, which she treated in a flexible, non-academic manner. Her experiments in this field, her use of fixed forms established by learned tradition (the Chaconne of 1962, or the Piano Sonata of 1965), her curiosity and openness (she was as interested in electronic music as in improvisation on folk instruments from non- European traditions), and finally her openly professed religious faith were hardly calculated to please the censors. Despite the relative relaxation of the Party’s cultural policy after Stalin’s death, the young woman ran into difficulties with the notorious “Union of Composers”, which banned the performance of her works in concert from 1970 onwards. That same body had made Shostakovich tremble more than once, with its repeated accusations of “formalism”.
The Chaconne included in this recording is a fine illustration of Gubaïdulina’s independence of mind and of her refusal to bow to the aesthetic requirements advocated by the dominant ideology. Chromatic, with hints of polytonality and a touch of whole-tone scale, this virtuoso piece summons the idiom of fugue and counterpoint, blending a tribute to Bach with an exploration of the piano’s sonorities that passes through sharply contrasted expressive and stylistic worlds. Close to the passacaglia, the chaconne calls on a so-called “obstinate” bass, which turns cyclically upon itself through successive variations. Shostakovich too was very fond of this form, which he used regularly for its sorrowful connotation: thus in Opus 127 the “sleeping city” plunged into darkness (No. 4) is composed as a passacaglia.
“I wish you to follow your own ‘wrong path’”, the composer had whispered to Gubaïdulina as the young woman was completing her composition degree in 1963, in the face of criticism from several members of the jury. Recounting this memorable episode many years later, Gubaïdulina added: “Sometimes someone utters a single word, but it proves decisive and illuminates the path of a whole lifetime.”
Mathilde Reichler
Translation: Michelle Bulloch – Musitext
[Access programme texts, as well as the lyrics and translations of the melodies here]
Aleksandr Shaikin piano
Larissa Rosanoff soprano
Irina Chkourindina piano
Oleg Kaskiv violin
David Pia cello
Return to the album | Read the booklet | Composer(s): Various Composers | Main Artist: Larissa Rosanoff
Cello
Chamber
David Pia - cello
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
High-resolution audio - Studio master quality
In stock
Irina Chkourindina - piano
Larissa Rosanoff - soprano
Modern
Nicolas Bolens (*1963)
Oleg Kaskiv - violin
Opera vocal
Piano
Sofia Gubaidulina (1931-2025)
Soon
Soprano
Various composers
Violin
World Premiere Recording
Cello
Chamber
David Pia - cello
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
High-resolution audio - Studio master quality
In stock
Irina Chkourindina - piano
Larissa Rosanoff - soprano
Modern
Nicolas Bolens (*1963)
Oleg Kaskiv - violin
Opera vocal
Piano
Sofia Gubaidulina (1931-2025)
Soon
Soprano
Various composers
Violin
World Premiere Recording
