FULL LAMENTS AND HYMNS Perm 2024 Moscow Ensemble of Contemporary Music
Information on the Performance
- Work Title: LAMENTS AND HYMNS
- Composer: various, see below
- Libretto: various, see below
- Venue & Opera Company: Organ Hall of the Perm Philharmonic, Perm, Russia, Diaghilev Festival
- Recorded: June 28, 2024
- Type: Concert Live
- Singers:
- Conductor:
- Orchestra: Moscow Ensemble of Contemporary Music
- Stage Director:
- Costume Designer:
Information about the Recording
- Published by: Diaghilev Festival
- Date Published: 2024
- Format: Streaming
- Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
- Subtitles: nosubs
- Video Recording from: YouTube FULL VIDEO
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE
In the program “Laments and Hymns” of the Moscow Ensemble of Contemporary Music, composers of three generations of the Russian avant-garde enter into dialogue, exploring the innermost world of deep human experiences: ritual suffering, euphoria and spiritual experience.
The first avant-garde is represented by the figure of Arthur Lurie – a dandy and bohemian esthete who abandoned his studies at the St. Petersburg Conservatory in order to build a utopian future for new music. In the first half of the 1910s, Lurie was friends with Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov, Tatlin and Akhmatova, wore provocative costumes and was the de facto musical director of the Stray Dog cabaret, the legendary meeting place of the capital’s futurists. In his radical works, he experimented with atonality, microchromatics and unusual notation. Against their background, “The Lamentation of the Virgin Mary” in the Old French text translated by Mikhail Kuzmin surprises, rather, with its traditionalism. Expressive dissonances only highlight the subtle lyrics here, in which one can hear the familiarity of the author, who converted to Catholicism in 1913, with church life.
Alfred Schnittke’s “Hymns” were written in the 1970s and reflect the period of spiritual and stylistic search that their author was going through at that time. Schnittke himself claims that the initial impulse for composing “Hymns” was not religious, but research – interest in ancient Russian music theory and the timbre similarity of low instruments. Three of the four parts were written for the occasion, to order or as film music. All the more remarkable is the final integrity and obvious religious background of “Hymns” as a cycle. Their slow time and harsh coloring are associated with the temple space: archaic chants acquire a mysterious hum, turn into tart polyphony and are interspersed with mysterious sphinx-like harmonies. There is not a trace of the author’s signature play with styles: Schnittke is persistently looking for a single language at this time, fusing together different facets of his composer personality.
Alexei Sysoev’s play “The Orphan” is addressed not so much to children as to everyone who, to one degree or another, feels their own orphanhood in the current world. It is based on an authentic northern folklore text, which the author interprets extremely seriously, without a hint of irony and without a hint of detachment or distance. This is a ritual lament of the era of raves, post-avant-garde and virtual reality, music locked in its inner pain, which in the end still finds the strength to open up to the outside world, promising the audience a timid hope for the best.