Alexander Rag

Elena Kats-Chernin often writes small rags as an antidote to the pressure of serious large scale composition. These works have surprisingly become her most well known and popular works and will probably in time build up into a Well Tempered Clavier style set of 24 linked yet completely separate works. Deeply personal objects, often written as a release in some time of personal difficulty, they are with out any doubt vessels that carry deep waters, small worlds that embrace bittersweet feelings, the contradictory states of pain and joy intermingled; the smiling through tears that is both deeply Russian and feminine - to hear one of Elena's rags is to know a small part of her own life intimately.