Waltz as a farewell

Opera “Exercises and Dances of Guido” at the anniversary of Tatyana Grindenko and Vladimir Martynov

For anyone who is at least a little familiar with the modern musical situation, just the list of names of the celebrants of this evening sounds like heroic music. Composer Vladimir Martynov and violinist Tatyana Grindenko are perhaps the most important figures in the current musical landscape, without them it would look, sound and essentially be completely different. Just like without Tatyana Grindenko’s “Early Music Ensemble”, which turned 25 years old, and without the same ensemble, but under a different, conceptual name Opus Post (according to official estimates, it is only five). At the same time, one ensemble plays ancient music, the other - modern, but just as it is difficult to draw a line between two brands, in the case of Martynov and Grindenko the line between ancient and new music-making is called into question.

An ardent performer of Martynov's music, a former laureate of the Tchaikovsky Competition, a student of Professor Yankelevich Tatyana Grindenko, stubbornly violates the fossilized rules of traditional concert practices, establishing, downright enforcing her own and Martynov's, provoking those around her to participate in these illegal actions. The paradoxical concept of Martynov (researcher of ancient musical texts, scientist, composer, author of video installations, etc.) - “about the death of composing and performing” and “about the creation of a new sacred space” (which, in fact, is what Opus Post is doing) - is here starting point. The ideology of “post-empty” music (“the goal of which is not the expression and experience of reality, but staying in it, where the “context” is sometimes more important than the “text” itself”) is as strict and uncompromising as the also uncompromising, but free and non-obvious ones that arise around and projects about it.

They affirm the beauty and power of context (otherwise some of Lyubimov’s performances at Taganka, Anatoly Vasilyev’s at the School of Dramatic Art, Ilya Eipelbaum’s projects, multimedia events and new recordings with the Auktsion group, Leonid Fedorov, Vladimir Volkov, Dmitry Prigov, Vladimir Tarasov, Lev Rubinstein), but still the texts themselves remain important, ranging from painfully complex to hypnotically beautiful.

This text, preceded by “Love Madrigals” by Claudio Monteverdi, performed by the Academy, soprano Galina Muradova and baroque master tenor Mark Tucker, was played at the anniversary in the Tchaikovsky Hall. The opera “Exercises and Dances of Guido”, dedicated to the thousandth anniversary of the inventor of modern notation, Guido Aretinsky, was written in the late 90s at the request of the elegant Festival of Sacred Arts in the small German Lokkum (for several years the latest and rare Russian music was sounded there, performances were staged, seminars were held) and was performed there for the first time (due to a small overlay, not even completely). It has not yet been heard in Moscow.

“Guido’s Exercises and Dances” is one of Martynov’s most “stubbornly conceptualist” works. There is little “sweet” in it (under the guise of “beautiful music” seducing both sophisticated and undemanding listeners), little multimedia play. It's almost a pure concept in sound - an adventure of a scale spanning an hour of concert time or ten centuries of musical history. We are talking here (if you “buy” into the plot offered to us) about a real meeting between Guido D'Arezzo and the Pope, who allowed the use of Guido's new notation (five lines, six - at that time - notes), which entailed a whole story European music, music of author's self-expression. The musical plot is choral chants, trampling scales, tenor arias (the same clatter of disobedient notes in which the ghost of bel canto is seen), duets as a scheme of the genre (anniversaries) and unsteady orchestral ritornellos - an operatic tune that certainly falls back into choral archaism . At the end there are provocative orchestral and organ dances (something like a menacing archaic waltz) and the thinning clanging of the celesta, flying away to the heavens. Bonaventure's treatise on the six steps of the soul's ascent to God (corresponding in turn to Guido's six note steps) is thus brought to its final point, and if anyone did not pay attention to the main characters of the opera (these are the styles of Monteverdi, Mozart and Rossini), then in any In one way or another, everyone has made some kind of difficult ascent. An opera-action about history, written by means of avoiding and overcoming traditional plot formulas as representatives of the flow of time (in particular, with the help of a trampling minimalist form with a conceptualist secret at the end), this is, of course, not a Greek tragedy in the interpretation of the Florentine Academy, but a manifesto . Cheerful and stern at the same time. An insistent farewell instead of the inertia of history.

The performers - in addition to the Opus Post ensemble, also Lev Kantorovich's Chamber Choir "Spiritual Revival", the florid and earnest Mark Tucker, soprano Yana Ivanilova and Tatyana Monogarova (the same Tatyana from the new "Eugene Onegin" of the Bolshoi Theater staged by Dmitry Chernyakov) - did an excellent job . Showing in performance and music not only all the subtleties of concept, structure and texture, but also all the difficult heroics of the old opera and our troubled times. And all life and love, to which both Monteverdi’s madrigals that opened the concert and the strict practices of Grindenko’s ensembles and Martynov’s works are dedicated.

Yulia BEDEROVA