Nikolai Roslavets

Ukrainian-Russian composer and musicologist Nikolai Andreyevich Roslavets was born at Surazh on 5 January 1881.

As 'the Russian Schoenberg', he invented a new system of organising sounds, based on 'synthetic chords' of between six and nine tones each.

Writing in a modernist, leftist style, he fell from grace and was forced to repent his 'political mistakes' in public, and from 1930 both he and his music were completely supressed by the Soviet authorities until his death in Moscow on 23 August 1944. His widow rescued some of his scores from an apartment ransacking and manuscript confiscation visit by former proletarian musicians, but it was not until the 1970s that his music was discovered in Western Europe and his name began to reappear, recovering from his 'non-person' status.

A selection of articles about Nikolai Roslavets

Resounding Echoes by Robert McCarney - Kids' Stuff

Ensemble. Rediscovering Scriabin - Italian pianist Mariangela Vacatello plays Scriabin from memory, heard by Giuseppe Pennisi

Record Box. Unjustly Neglected - Violin concertos by Nikolay Roslavets impress Gerald Fenech

Violin Master - Gordon Rumson reports on a rare Carnegie Hall appearance of Mark Lubotsky