Standard classical repertoire is by no means the limit of violinist Tatyana Grindenko’s musical interests. Trained under the mighty Soviet system in St Petersburg (by Boris Sergeyev, a pupil of Auer-trained Miron Polyarkin) and Moscow (by Yuri Yankelevich), she won prizes at various well-established competitions including the Tchaikovsky and Wieniawski, and started on the usual path of touring and recording. Towards the end of the 1970s, though, she began to step away from the mainstream, becoming a member of one of the USSR’s first rock groups, Boomerang, along with composer and keyboardist Vladimir Martynov who introduced her to works by little-known early composers such as Dufay and Ockeghem, as well as the avant-garde—both areas marked with official disapproval by the Soviet regime. Grindenko’s pioneering spirit also led her to cofound the first Baroque ensemble in the USSR, the Moscow Academy of Early Music, with her brother, Alexei Lyubimov. Her explorations of new music and new ways of performing old music have been embodied more recently in the work of the ensemble Opus Posth, which realises the philosophical concepts of Grindenko and Martynov. Considering themselves ‘channels of time’ through playing music, they offer post-modern reappraisals of long-dead composers’ works, capturing their spirit often in a minimalist or ‘trance’ style, and with the performers wearing face masks in order to conceal their living personages.

Grindenko’s playing, albeit not entirely accurate at all times, indicates a strong musical personality and an ardent attitude. Her most commendable mainstream recordings are perhaps the Pärt and Roslavets works selected here, the former (recorded with her ex-husband Gidon Kremer in 1977) for the tightness and discipline of her sound, complementing Kremer’s playing in this remote, even objective musical language; the latter for a seamless blend with the orchestra in a work that seeks colour and texture ahead of the virtuosic demands of an instrumental concerto. There are moments of rather shaky intonation (especially in the finale of the Roslavets) but such is the power and sincerity of Grindenko’s playing that these blemishes do not detract from the performances overall. The Roslavets recording (1989) was the first made of this 1925 work, the Russian expressionist composer having met with political disapproval and his works having been suppressed after his death.

As an early performance of the Brahms Violin Concerto (recorded at the 1972 Wieniawski Competition) shows, Grindenko’s strong tone, at times a little strident on the E-string and barely softened by a quite wide vibrato, is not always the most controlled or indeed, tonally the most alluring but, in an age in which string playing is often the victim of uniformity, hers is a distinctive musical personality.

© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — David Milsom (A–Z of String Players, Naxos 8.558081-84)