What a descent into hell for Vsevolod Zaderatsky! It all started so well, in a solid bourgeois family of senior civil servants in Russia; after his studies in the Moscow Conservatoire with Taneyev and Ippolitov-Ivanov, he was taken on as a piano tutor to the Tsarevitch Alexey in 1915 and 1916. And we all know what happened in 1917... From then on, Zaderatsky would spend his live in prison, exile, Stalinist purges, and several stays in the worst gulags of the Soviet dictatorship. It was in this camp, Kolyma in North-Eastern Siberia (the "Land of the White Death"), where 30% of prisoners died in their first year, and virtually none survived their second, that Zaderatsky would write, without a piano and using whatever he could scavenge, his wonderful cycle of 24 preludes and a fugue.
Set free and still alive at the outbreak of the Second World War, the composer was ping-ponged from one little provincial posting to another, finally ending his life and his career in his native country of Ukraine. We only know about his written output from 1928 until his death, as almost all his earlier works were destroyed following his first arrest. His Sonatas were written between 1928 and 1941, and the 24 Preludes in 1934; this album also includes his Album of Miniatures, the very original Homeland, which presumably describes some of his ancestors' Ukrainian birthplaces, or the sinister Front, which, as the name suggests, evokes life on the front line. These are the works that Jascha Nemtsov offers us the chance to discover. Don't expect an epigone of Shostakovich or Prokofiev: Zaderatsky is a fully independent composer, very modern, who doesn't follow any school or any model. In particular, he owes nothing to Shostakovich, or to Prokofiev, the first his junior, the other his exact contemporary; listen to the 20th Prelude, which perhaps deliberately refers to Satie's Parade? He developed a piano-based language which was absolutely unique and perfectly charming - and which is well overdue for rehabilitation. © SM/Qobuz