An exciting programme with master pieces for cello and piano by some of the greatest Russian composers of this century with a rich and glorious recorded sound which will appeal to the still growing crowd of chamber music adherents.
Dmitry Ferschtman was born in Moscow and started his musical training at a verry early age at the Central School of Music. At the Moscow Conservatory he studied with, among others, Natalia Gutman. In July 1975, he took part in the last recording of a work by Shostakovich supervised by the composer himself and in 1978 he moved to Holland from where he started a highly successful career as solo cellist with numerous radio recordings and concert appearances all over the world.
Mila Baslawskaya also studied at the Central School of Music (a division of the Tchaikovsky Conservatory) in her city of birth, Moscow. She graduated 'cum laude' from the Moscow Conservatory in 1970 and emigrated with her husband Dmitry Ferschtman in 1978 to Holland, where she pursued her career as recitalist and chamber music player.
Alfred Schnittke was the son to German-Jewish father and Volga-German mother from Frankfurt am Main. His musical education started in 1946 in Vienna, where his father worked as a journalist and translator, and from 1948 he continued his studies in Moscow. From the 1970s, he would fully dedicate himself to composing. Schnittke's style was initially avant garde, strongly influenced by the Western composition techniques such as serialism and aleatorism. Like so many of his generation, Schnittke found these techniques to be unsatisfactory, and so he created his own style which he called polystylism, inspired by Charles Ives, Luciano Berio and Bernd Alois Zimmermann, but also Gustav Mahler,It is characterised by the parodic combinations of styles from different periods, by some recognised as postmodernism.
Play album
