Alexander Lazarevich Lokshin (1920-1987) was one of the most original representatives of the Russian school of the 20th century and unfortunately underrated in his lifetime. A pupil of Nikolai Myaskovsky and a friend of Dmitri Shostakovich, who admired his music, Lokshin was a creator of his individual style with an organic blend of symphonic, chamber and vocal genres.

His two-movement Symphony No.5 (1969) is the composer’s characteristic type of “symphony with voice” written for baritone and chamber orchestra and based on Shakespeare’s Sonnets 66 and 73 (translated into Russian by Boris Pasternak). The Quintet for clarinet and strings (1955) also has two parts: a slow one, where, according to the composer, “Shostakovich and Vertinsky were combined in a very paradoxical way,” is followed by variations inspired by Stravinsky’s style. The two large cycles are supplemented with an earlier piece, Variations for Piano (1953), written “in the vein of Shostakovich” and dedicated to Maria Grinberg, an outstanding Soviet pianist and successor of Felix Blumenfeld’s school.

Alexander Lokshin’s works are performed by some of the most prominent Russian musicians of the last century: Symphony No.5 is performed by Rudolf Barshai, a friend and admirer of the composer, and creator of the first Soviet chamber orchestra, and Yan Kratov, a soloist of the Moscow Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Academic
Music Theatre; the Quintet features Ivan Mozgovenko, a clarinettist and People’s Artist of Russia, and the Komitas Quartet, one of the oldest chamber ensembles of this country; and the Piano Variations are performed by Maria Grinberg.

Recorded 1971 (Symphony), 1960 (Clarinet Quintet), 1956 (Variations)