Evgenij Gunst
Works for Piano
including Heidelberg Sketches, Danses Fantasques,
Douze Miniatures
Susanne Maria Schwarz, piano
In the spring of 2010, in the basement of the Musicological
Seminar of the University of Basle, the estate of
the Russian composer Evgenij Gunst was discovered.
It hadended up there in an adventurous manner, and
been stored, unobserved, for over a half century in
two battered packing cases in the rearmost corner of
the archive room. Evgenij Gunst was born into a rich
Moscow family, the son of a father of German origins.
In his time, he was a highly regarded artist, in some respects
also providing artistic stimulus in pre-revolutionary
Russia. Gunst associated with the most important
personalities of the Russian musical scene; amongstothers,
he was a close associate of the Russian composer
Aleksandr Skrjabin. After the revolutionary upheavals,
he emigrated in 1920 via Estonia to Paris.Although he
was active in the Parisian cultural environment during
his exile for the rest of his life – amongst other things,
he was a co-founder of the Conservatoire russe in Paris
– he died there unrecognised and impoverished in
1950. Today, his name hardly appears in any encyclopaedia
of Russian music. His biography appears to have
been as much deleted from general consciousness as
from official music history.
With the present CD, the pianist Susanne Maria Schwarz
proves that the oblivion of Evgenij Gunst has been
completely undeserved.