Olga Andryushchenko – 20th Century Piano Works

Melodiya presents piano works of the Russian avant-garde of the 1960s to 1990s, performed by Olga Andryushchenko. Olga Andryushchenko graduated from the Moscow Conservatory where she studied historical and modern performing arts with Professor Alexei Lyubimov and later improved her skills as a post-graduate student of Hochschule für Musik in Cologne. Specialising in Russian music of the 20th and 21st centuries, she has recorded complete piano pieces by Alexander Mosolov and Nikolai Roslavets. Olga Andryushchenko considers her first Melodiya album a continuation of her work on domestic post-war avant-garde music. The selection of works on the album is quite uncommon. The majority of the programme consists of avant-garde classics, written in the early, experimental years of each composer’s artistic career and often in homage to neoclassicism – Sofia Gubaidulina’s Chaconne, Arvo Pärt’s Partita and Valentin Silvestrov’s Sonata No. 1. In its own way, each of the pieces gives an idea of the composers’ artistic essence. The other part is dedicated to music created during another period of this school – the late 1980s and early 1990s – Galina Ustvoslkaya’s Sonata No. 6 and Alfred Schnittke’s Sonata No. 3. The air of freedom inspired by perestroika had a significant impact on the development of avant-garde music, the status of which transformed from semi-legal to the leading direction of late-Soviet musical art. Edison Denisov’s 3 Preludes of 1994, one of the master’s last pieces, is a peculiar romantic afterword to the programme.