Dukach/Kebuladze - Alexander Tcherepnin: My Flowering Staff

In 1925�26 the French publisher Heugel brought out three volumes of 24 songs by the young Russian composer Alexander Tcherepnin (1899�1977), all setting poems by the �Acmeist� Russian poet, Sergei Gorodetsky (1884�1967) � Tcherepnin�s Opp. 15, 16 and 17. Not until 2014, when Tatyana Kebuladze, the pianist on this recording, examined the composer�s manuscript in the archives of the Sacher Foundation in Basel was it realised that those three recueils were the tips of a much larger iceberg: a cycle of 35 settings of the 37 poems in Gorodetsky�s collection My Flowering Staff, plus an anonymous epilogue � one of the most extensive song-cycles in musical history. The songs themselves are audibly in the tradition of Tchaikovsky and other such Romantic Russian composers, but with a degree of psychological insight conveyed through the harmonic piquancy typical of the new century.