Songs & Choruses [CD de audio] Natalia Gerassimova, Arthur Lourié and Tamara Piliptchuk

Arthur Lourié was the type of artist of the golden twenties in Paris. In 1917, during the October Revolution in Petrograd (St. Petersburg), he lived in a scandalous menage à trois with the married poet Anna Achmatova and the actress Olga Sudeikina. When he was young, he had a radically modern style, inspired by Strawinsky and, in some cases, even anticipating some of his developments. He fled from the Bolsheviks to the west and never again received the creative attention he deserved, which also had to do with his change of style towards a distinguished neoclassicism. The avant-garde after World War II had other ideals, and it was only after his death that musicians like Gidon Kremer rescued him from oblivion. Her ecstatic choral cantata The Shrine of the Golden Dream, with a text by the Russian symbolist Alexander Blok, is the main work of this recording, confronted with the complaint of the Holy Virgin and Achmatova's late and laconic versions of her autobiographical poem Without a hero of 1959.