Although the Centre for Russian Music's day of concerts claimed to be a celebration of the "Unknown, Forgotten and Remembered", the most striking feature of much of the music was the exploitation of extremes.
In Elena Firsova's Sonata for solo clarinet, a wailing, glissando-inflected melody was magnified and distended through Colin Lawson's carefully sculpted playing into ever-wilder contrasts and conflicts. From the same generation of fortysomething Russian composers, Alexander Raskatov's Kyrie Eleison for solo cello required Alexander Ivashkin to tap, stroke and batter his instrument. However, these apparent gimmicks brought expressive dividends.
The "Unknown" was represented by world premieres of works by Alfred Schnittke, Dmitri Smirnov and Edison Denisov. Schnittke's Variations for string quartet is one of the composer's last pieces, written during his final years of severe physical debilitation. It is possible to hear the Variations' unalloyed diatonicism as an attempt to create a serene musical perfection. But the work treads close to saccharine banality - this is no Heiliger Dankgesang-like catharsis.
Dmitri Smirnov's Postlude in Memoriam Alfred Schnittke is a lamenting melody for solo violin, whose sincere sentiments suffered under Oleh Krysa's oppressively bright tone. The most interesting of the world premieres was Denisov's Hymn for eight cellos, which had all the energy and melancholy of a Shostakovich scherzo, its slow movement compressed into a single, six-minute blaze.
Sofia Gubaidulina's Quaternion for four cellos, new to this country, was an intense exploration of the enormous range of this most sonorous of instrumental line-ups: from the tiny, breathy sounds made from bowing the outside of the instruments, to a catatonic, chromatic polyphony. Another British premier, of Vladimir Tarnopolsky's trio, Echoes of a Passed Day, allowed the musicians to show off their theatrical skills in a chaotic combination of gestures, speech and impassioned playing.
Notable among other novelties was Boris Berman's performance of a luxuriously abundant piano sonata by a 19-year-old Boris Pasternak - written before he dropped music to become a poet and author. But the real star was Alexander Ivashkin who, in addition to appearing in the other concerts, gave a fascinating recital of Alexander Tcherepnin's music for piano and cello. Despite Geoffrey Tozer's galumphing accompaniments, Ivashkin revealed the forward-thinking imagination of this lesser-known contemporary of Prokofiev.
