Paramozarts

Youtube announced the winners of the composing competition

The Youtube composition competition announced the names of the laureates exactly on time and, unlike the situation with the finalists, successfully avoided both procedural glitches and scandalous selection. Through the voice of the chairman of the professional jury, conductor Teodor Currentzis, the competition website announces the decision not to award first prize. The first place should be occupied by a work that “changes the emphasis of its time, is the flagship of an entire movement, as was the case with Mozart, Beethoven, Shostakovich. This time we didn't find anything like that. But everyone understands that works of genius are not born every day.” Currentzis notes that “the jury made very high demands on the competing compositions, so the winners take their rightful place among modern composers.”

Thus, even before becoming acquainted with the names of the winners and the titles of the winning scores, the listener learns that the prize list does not include either the new Mozart, or the modern Beethoven, or even even Shostakovich.

None of the following changes the emphasis of its time. And although composer Vladimir Gorlinsky (a student of Professor Vladimir Tarnopolsky) is quite obviously the flagship of an entire direction (the association “Plasticity of Sound” actively advocates and clearly articulates its positions), the status of this direction is not assessed as significant by the competition.

Nevertheless, Gorlinsky’s composition Paramusic took second place, sharing it with Natalia Prokopenko’s diploma score “Arche” - “about the creative process as such, about creating harmony from chaos and a whole from a set of elements.”

Both award-winning opuses look like high-quality professional works, and Gorlinsky (“the composition is complex, here each of the orchestra members at some point turns out to be a soloist”) is very recognizable in his archaic sincere modernist frenzy.

The composition “Evening in the Steppe” took third place, and the audience award for the play “Winter Bells” took fourth place on the list. Despite the related style of the titles, which constitute a kind of antithesis to the first two titles, there is a huge gap between the works and the principles professed by their authors (Kirill Umansky and Polina Nazaikinskaya, respectively).

“Winter Bells” by Yale University student Nazaikinskaya is the only play on the list of winners that has a melody in the traditional sense. And the fact that a poetic retro poem has found its way to the heart of the Internet public is natural - landscapes at street art fairs are always sold out better than abstractions, even good ones and even those with some poetic name.

In a word, the list of winners looks harmonious (by the way, it was almost exactly predicted in the blog of composer Boris Filanovsky) and could well have done without apologies for the lack of new Mozarts. Why give the public reason to think that they love modern music so much that they deserve Mozart? Or: that her desire to really listen to Beethoven at a modern composition competition deserves serious attention not only from a narrow professional community, but also from the entire artistic community?

Now the Moscow public will be able to hear the music of the winners live at a concert on September 9 in the Tchaikovsky Hall. Chairman Currentzis himself will conduct. Play - the same Russian National Orchestra, which, with more or less success, swearing on blogs and marveling at modern music in the process of performing it, generally mastered the enormous work of studio scoring of most of the works that took part in the finals.

Yulia BEDEROVA