This CD is ostensibly a tribute to nineteenth century Russian publisher and patron Mitrofan Petrovitch Belaieff, yet most listeners will find this a bit thin as a unifying concept. Belaieff died in 1903, well before any of this album's composers were born, and the pieces included here were not conceived as memorials to him. Granted, soprano Elena Vassilieva and composer Alexandr Raskatov drew on the Belaieff Publishing House's extensive catalog to find enough works for soprano and string quartet to fill the program, and the ...
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This CD is ostensibly a tribute to nineteenth century Russian publisher and patron Mitrofan Petrovitch Belaieff, yet most listeners will find this a bit thin as a unifying concept. Belaieff died in 1903, well before any of this album's composers were born, and the pieces included here were not conceived as memorials to him. Granted, soprano Elena Vassilieva and composer Alexandr Raskatov drew on the Belaieff Publishing House's extensive catalog to find enough works for soprano and string quartet to fill the program, and the somber moods of these compositions and their texts suggest that some commemorative theme is in order. But if the Belaieff connection seems tangential, then one may just enjoy the interesting variety of expressions and tone colors in these modernist settings of Russian, French, English, Latin, and Hebrew texts: Mieczyslav Vainberg's mildly Expressionist setting of Lermontov's poem "Three Palms," Ivan Tcherepnin's stylistically varied Point n'était de vent, Vladislav Shoot's...
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