ALEXANDER MOSOLOV (1900-1973)

COMPLETE WORKS FOR SOLO PIANO

OLGA ANDRYUSHCHENKO

Alexander Vasilyevich Mosolov was one of the most prominent Soviet experimentalist composers of the 1920s. Famed for his futurist orchestral piece The Iron Foundry, this ‘constructivist’ began to forge new directions through his use of motor rhythms, percussive attacks, and melodic angularity. Imprisoned for eight months in 1937, he later sank into undeserved obscurity. In the four surviving Piano Sonatas, Mosolov shows himself to be one of the boldest and most complex Russian composers of his time.

About this Recording

ALEXANDER MOSOLOV regarded his piano sonatas as a miniature compendium of his entire output, reflecting a fundamentally Romantic approach melded with Stravinskian vitality. The Sixth Sonata’s poised profundity, inventiveness and structural perfection gives it a place as one of the best in its genre, its serene transparency lying between the powerfully heroic Fifth Sonata and the crystalline quality of the Seventh; a summation of expression in a work that Frommel was conscious would be his last.

OLGA ANDRYUSHCHENKO

OLGA ANDRYUSHCHENKO was educated at the Central Special Music School, and the Faculty of Historical and Modern Performing Arts of the Moscow Tchaikovsky State Conservatory under Alexei Lubimov. She has won a number of important prizes and awards, including the 4th International Piano Competition “Franz Schubert and the Music of Modernity” in Austria (2000), the Premio Vanna Spadafor International Piano Competition in Italy (2004), the Bach Competition in Leipzig (2006), the A. Scriabine International Piano Competition in Paris (2008), and the N. Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Paris (2008). She is an active international performer, and appears regularly as a soloist and in ensembles, playing piano, organ, fortepiano or harpsichord. She has recorded extensively for radio and now lives in Germany.