Alexandre Nicolaïevitch Tcherepnine (1899-1977)
My Fflowering Staff. Opp. 15, 16 and 17.
Toccata Classics TOCC053
First complete recording

Inna Dukach, soprano (Tracks 1–16, 18-22, 24-37)
Paul Whelan, bass (Track 17)
Acmeist Male Choir (Track 17)
Tatyana Kebuladze, piano

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.