ROSLAVETS, NIKOLAY (1881–1944)

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 also studied organ. She completed her postgraduate studies at the same conservatory, and was also a DAAD scholarship-holder at the Cologne Hochschule für Musik. 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 Premium Piano Seiler 2nd International Piano Competition in Germany (2001), the Premio Vanna Spadafor International Piano Competition in Italy (2004), the Bach Competition in Leipzig (2006), the Musica Antiqua International Fortepiano Competition in Belgium (2007), the A. Scriabine International Piano Competition in Paris (2008), the N. Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Paris (2008), and the Fortepiano Competition in Schloss Kremsegg (2011). She was a soloist of the Moscow State Philharmonic Society (2002–2004), and performs both as a soloist and in ensembles, playing piano, organ, fortepiano or harpsichord. She has also given a number of piano recitals and played with many orchestras worldwide. Olga has recorded extensively for radio and now lives in Germany.

The composer, violinist and teacher Nikolai Roslavets was born in Central Ukraine and studied at the Moscow Conservatory, where his teachers included Ippolitov-Ivanov and the violinist Hrímalý. He graduated with a composition based on Byron’s Heaven and Earth and embarked, with the help of his parents-in-law, on a career as a free-lance composer and music critic. He collaborated with other leading young composers, including Myaskovsky, in the foundation of a group that in 1923 was to become the Association for Contemporary Music. After the February Revolution of 1917 he joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and in 1918 was a member of a group affiliated to the Bolsheviks, breaking off his connection in 1921. He did much in the following years to promote the cause of contemporary music, notably as a leader of the Association for Contemporary Music, while defending traditional musical training and earning the condemnation of the Association of Proletarian Musicians, who stigmatized him as a formalist, class enemy, Trotskyite and anti-Soviet. In 1931 he moved from Moscow to Tashkent, where he worked as a conductor, composer and director at the Music Theatre. Two years later he returned to Moscow, where he had difficulty in keeping body and soul together, proscribed by the Soviet authorities, but was teaching privately. At his death in 1944 many of his manuscripts were seized by the secret police, but others were preserved by his widow and by one of his pupils. Perestroika has allowed a revival of interest in his work.