BORIS TCHAIKOVSKY (1925-1996): Piano Quintet, The War Suite for String Quartet with Clarinet.

Description: Its amazing how the shadow of Shostakovich hangs over the second generation of Soviet composers.  Even though the tray-card blurb calls Tchaikovsky "one of the most original and innovative composers of the post-Shostakovich generation", the average collector, without musical education, will still hear Dmitri in Boris's music: the almost always present tension (perhaps unavoidable in non-toady Soviet composers?), menacing ostinati, tense, uneasy lyricism... Oddly, given that the War Suite is a concert version of a score for a 1964 film ("While the Front is in Defence") set at the Volkhov Front near Leningrad in 1942, it's less militaristic sounding than one of the piano quintet's movements (the quintet is from just two years earlier). The film score is unusual for using only string quartet with the addition of a clarinet in four of its eleven sections. Vanbrugh Quartet, Olga Solovieva (piano), Maxim Anisimov (clarinet).