The composer’s wife, the singer Nina Alexandrova, gave public performances of her husband’s songs over many decades, with him at the piano. Her death must have caused a deep wound in Alexandrov’s unspectacular domestic life. This agony and farewell find musical expression in several piano pieces that he dedicated to her. One of them is the sixth of the ten
Romantic Episodes Op 88 (1962), which in their unabashed sentimentality, melodic indulgence and harmonic strength come near to Rachmaninov: a bewitchingly fragile Adagio which seems to have been inspired by Chopin’s E flat minor Etude, Op 10, No 6.
from notes by Christoph Flamm © 2002
English: Roland Smithers
