| "Babi Yar" at the Dmitry Shostakovich festival At the festival for the 100th anniversary of Shostakovich, his Thirteenth Symphony “Babi Yar” to the poems of Yevgeny Yevtushenko was performed by the Bolshoi Symphony Orchestra with Vladimir Fedoseev at the helm and Sergei Aleksashkin as a soloist. Impressive in size and almost grandiose in meaning, the score of 1962, heard quite rarely in Russia, in five parts (“Babi Yar”, “Humor”, “In the Store”, “Fears”, “Career”) with texts more than poster-sized - Square again did not leave the audience indifferent. The Thirteenth Symphony still causes amazement, and to a large extent precisely because of the lyrics - incredible, straightforward, somehow at the same time dashing and awkward, as if deaf to their own sound (such rhymes: “Fears are old women,” “ Life - bye-bye"), then suddenly successfully fit into dense, square semantic stacks. “Oh, my Russian people, / I know / You are essentially international,” “He knew that the Earth was spinning, / But he had a family,” “International” let it thunder, / When he is buried forever / The last one on earth anti-Semite”, “Fears are dying in Russia”, “These are women of Russia. This is our honor and judgment. And they kneaded concrete, / And they plowed, and they mowed... They carried everything, they will carry everything.”
Grandiose, everyday, crudely majestic, like simple sculptures carved into a rock, the words, thanks to Shostakovich, sound like a symphony, which at one time caused a mixed reaction. It is important not only that it was banned, that Mravinsky refused to play the premiere, and we are still wondering for what reasons. It is important that her civic spirit also evokes artistic amazement with her areal cut, fused with a fairly sophisticated symphonic form. And it must be admitted that in Shostakovich these Yevtushenko texts sound almost ruder than if you read them on paper, when their own rhythm introduces a certain amount of grace into the lines of lines. But Shostakovich absolutely immortalized their square pathos, and he himself once again spoke strongly on painful topics in everyday language, paradoxical in the situation of high art.
Listening to all this is sometimes terribly awkward, but the score is sometimes repulsive, sometimes completely mesmerizing (like, for example, the choral psalmody in “Fears”), it has an amazing, multi-valued ending, which, for example, Alfred Schnittke could only dream of in the most beautiful dream. And the BSO again showed what an amazing thing this is, the Thirteenth Symphony, with its explosive relevance and inescapable aesthetic paradox.
Sergei Aleksashkin sounded not only good, but also authentic, and the Bolshoi Symphony Orchestra and Minin’s choir did everything to ensure that the sound was harmonious, intelligible, and intelligible. Fedoseev successfully avoided completely off-scale bombast, did not whip up quiet horrors in the slow part (“In the Store”), did not blind, did not threaten in “Fears” and “Career”. Perhaps the performance was a little lacking in perfection, in some places the characters diverged slightly, in some places they were not sung, in others the solos were not perfectly structured. But in everything there was not the grandeur of biting relevance, but a homely, rustic trepidation, which gave the symphony a new, unexpected, touching shade. Yulia BEDEROVA |
| |
