There's more to Russian music than Prokofiev and Shostakovich. The Centre for Russian Music's Discovery Day celebrated the past 50 years of Russian music, the period since the death of Stalin (who died on the same day as Prokofiev). Works by familiar figures such as Alfred Schnittke and Rodion Shchedrin featured alongside music by a much less well-known, younger generation - composers such as Ivan Sokolov and Alexander Raskatov.
Cellist Alexander Ivashkin's concert with Sokolov demonstrated the vibrant diversity of this music. The first movement of Prokofiev's Sonata for solo cello was unfinished at his death, but Ivashkin's performance of Vladimir Blok's completion revealed a concentrated, neoclassical structure.
Prokofiev's strategy of dealing with the regime was to work largely within the musical limits it imposed, but others took different strategies after Stalin's death. Galina Ustvolskaya is one of the most original composers of her generation, and her Grand Duet for cello and piano is typically uncompromising. The piece was composed in 1959 for Rostropovich, who refused to play it since "to have done so could have led to her expulsion from the Union of Composers". It is easy to hear why. The five movements create a thunderous, powerfully dissonant music that concentrates on vivid, extreme gestures, like hard-edged clusters at the top of the piano's register set against intense melodic lines in the cello part. Sokolov and Ivashkin generated a vivid energy in this music, especially in the pounding, jazz-like rhythms of the fourth movement.
Ustvolskaya's music sounds like nobody else's, and the Grand Duet was more distinctive than many of the works by younger composers on the programme. Dmitri Smirnov's Elegy In Memoriam Edison Denisov was a bland lament for solo cello and crystal glasses; and Alexander Raskatov's Dolce Far Niente was static and sentimental. But Sokolov's own Thirteen Pieces for piano revealed an unexpected absurdism. The individual works, a sequence of short musical and theatrical gestures, had titles such as Aeroplane and Universe. The universe was created by Sokolov blowing up and popping a red balloon, Death was represented by him treading silently on the piano's pedals, and Catastrophe was a duet for flageolet and piano - played simultaneously by Sokolov - that descended into chaos.
Equally individual was Franghiz Ali-Zade's Habil-Sajahy, for cello and piano, based on the musical traditions of her native Azerbaijan: the final image of a vivacious folk-dance snuffed out by destructive gestures in the piano part was chillingly effective.
