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VIOLA à l’ÉCOLE de PARIS

In the wake of World War I and the October Revolution, countless artists emigrated from Eastern Europe to Paris – particularly a number of Russians. They were able to build a reputation by virtue of keen public interest in their art, and sometimes thanks to savvy networking and helpful contacts. This was the case of Alexander Tcherepnin, whose father, a respected composer and conductor, had reaped great success in the first season of the legendary Ballets Russes in 1909. Alexander Tcherepnin was soon welcomed and adopted by groups of artists such as the École de Paris, a loose gathering of emigrants from several countries that included Bohuslav Martinů and Romanian composer Marcel Mihalovici.

Alexander Tcherepnin’s two brief pieces featured here, Romance (1922) and Elegy (1929), can only offer a glimpse of this widely traveled composer’s cosmopolitan output: he was a man constantly in search of new ideas. Tcherepnin could switch from one musical genre to another in an instant; he eventually even incorporated influences from the Far East. Although the Romance is still entirely under the spell of Late Romanticism, the Elegy is already quasi-Modernist in tone – a work revealing a heightened sensitivity for timbre, as we can hear, for instance, in its iridescent violin flageolets.

Approximately the same age as Tcherepnin and successful, like his colleague, as a pianist, Tibor Harsányi arrived in Paris via the Netherlands in 1923.….. (Excerpt from the liner notes by Johannes Jansen).