Arthur Lourié (1892 - 1966), 5 Préludes fragiles, Op.1 (1908 - 1910)

Performed by Jenny Lin

00:00 - No. 1 Lento
01:52 - No. 2 Calme, pas vite.
03:00 - No. 3 Tendre, pensif.
05:32 - No. 4 Affabile.
06:54 - No. 5 Modéré.

Arthur lourié, who was born in St. Petersburg and who died in Princeton, USA, was one of the Russian avant-gardists of the 1920s. Lourié was appointed "peoples commissar for music" in revolutionary Russia, went to Berlin in 1922 and then to Paris where he lived for 15 years. Emanating from Scriabin, between 1913 and 1917 committed to increasingly futuristic ideals towards atonality, he was strongly influenced by Stravinsky's style of composition at that time during the years he spent in Paris.

Despite his cooperative efforts, Lourié seems to have been generally not much liked, his music inexplicably overlooked during the entire quarter century he spent in the USA. Yet while the sharppenned Slonimsky notes somewhat sourly that Lourié, 'a philosopher by inclination, if not by academic training... had published some modernistic piano pieces in the early days of the Revolution', Vera Stravinsky is of the more generous opinion that Lourié's influence on Stravinsky in the mid 1920s was sufficiently far-reaching to merit 'a book in itself.'Stravinsky himself nonetheless took care effectively to supress all evidence of his one-time friend's personality.

RIP Hexameron: March 31, 2007 - February 29th, 2016

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