Rails Op. 16 Vladimir Deshevov (1889-1955) was just one of the many forgotten and repressed composers of the Soviet era. In the 1920s and 1930s, he was distinguished as an exceptional composer of avant-garde ballet, incidental music, and other various genres for the stage. His orchestral style shows influences of Mosolov, especially in the evocation of mechanist and urban sounds. "Ice and Steel" and "Rails" are his two most famous works and reveal a fascination with industrial machinery and the revolutionary spirit of the time. Deshevov was a true modernist and his inclination to the avant-garde was treated with suspicion and eventually hositiliy during Stalin's reign. Like Shostakovich and a slew of other fortunate Soviet composers, Deshevov was able to escape severe punishment by changing his idiom and producing acceptable propaganda pieces. Operas, ballet, film, and incidental music constitute the bulk of his oeuvre. However, there are a handful of early solo piano works that deserve some attention. "Rails" is one of them. It is not a very musically substantial piece, although I think it deserves a better performance than exhibited in the present recording. I've posted this more as a historical curiosity. The origins of this piano composition are probably linked to Deshevov's incidental music to a play of the same name. In the 1920s this little piano piece was greatly esteemed by other Soviet modernists and was even cited as a shining model of avant-garde composition <b>...</b>
prokofiev
stravinsky
shostakovich
mosolov
bartok
ornstein
