 (Fridays)  Quatuor Alcan ACD2 2500 Nineteenth-century Russia saw not only artistic revolutions, but also political, military, and economic ones. Pushkin's impetus in literature gave birth to, amongst others, Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. In music, even though Dargomijsky (1813-1869) had already won a measure of acceptance for a kind of music composed in Russia, it wasn't until the success of Glinka (1804-1857) that the idea really took hold that the land of the Tsars could produce its own musicians. This should be put in context. Russia - by which we mean the aristocracy capable of paying musicians - had almost always imported its musicians from Germany, from France or, more often than not, from Italy. “Russian” music was thus the music of the orthodox liturgy, which is to say popular or folkloric, while art music was that of the three other nations. The new bourgeois class, which came into being with liberalization after the era of Catherine the Great, had a taste for music. As in other countries, musical magazines began to appear. Mostly they published arrangements of popular melodies. This was not a trivial development, for from it sprang the idea that music that was typically Russian, with different modes, particular rhythms, and its own special colors, existed, or at least could exist. At that time waves of musical nationalism were sweeping post-Napoleonic Europe. … Pierre Vachon - Translated by Sean McCutcheon
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