Translated material
Impossible innovations
A music biennale will be held in Moscow
The concept of the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Performing Arts - an undertaking at first glance that is both esoteric and, in a good way, ambitious - lists as its starting point the First Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, which “made a breakthrough and changed ideas about Moscow cultural life.” But “the performing arts occupied a very modest place in it,” explains a release from the organizer of the new project, the Moscow House of Music.In the very birth of the Biennial of Performing Arts there are traces of the institutional and contextual problem of local musical life, in which all sorts of innovations happen, but they are, in fact, homeless. Composing is weak and unpopular, experimentation is marginalized, and performing is aware of itself in a traditional spirit, and even when performing something “modern”, it rarely takes on authorial (creating context, for example) functions, as has long been customary in Western “modern” music. traditions.
The “birth trauma” of the new project produces the effect of a certain escheat: if you listen to the title, the talk in the new concert series should not be about modern music (or contemporary art), but about new ways and principles of its performance by the heroes of the traditional concert ritual - “performers ”, now taking off their ceremonial tailcoats and bow ties for a noble purpose and finally becoming like a “modern artist”: at the same time an author, performer, hero, viewer and subject of their own art.
This idea in the schedule of the performing biennale most closely corresponds to a multimedia show from the philharmonic star of the new generation, cellist Denis Shapovalov.
The rest collected in the large program, not so much illustrating the peculiarities of the local existence of the idea of contemporary art on philharmonic soils, but rather demonstrating arrogant independence, looks like a detailed and broad exposition of world contexts, the fruits of the care of various kinds of overseas institutions, examples of cooperation, fragments of experiment and apprenticeship.
United by the theme of “multimedia” (“arising at the intersection of two popular ideas of the last century - the idea of innovation and the idea of the impossibility of innovation”), the House of Music will feature international forces of contemporary art, one way or another connected with musical, and not only, sounds.
There will be the Düsseldorf “Mechanical Ballet”, the heir of the Bauhaus, Moscow composers, using computer electronics and a live ensemble, will score the film “Moscow” from 1927, the performance “Italian and Russian Futurism” will present Gosha Kutsenko in the role of Mayakovsky, in the projects “Dance of Color Loy Fuller” and “Between Sound and Light”, multimedia will be balanced with multi-genres, and both will shimmer and shimmer, and in the opening concert today the authoritative ensemble “New Vocal Soloists of Stuttgart” will perform with the latest compositions, representing the physiognomy of modern musical art in a respectable European interpretation.