Facsimile edition

Vladimir Fedoseev completed the series “Do you love Brahms?”

The Aimez-vous Brams cycle ended on Sunday in the Great Hall of the Conservatory. (“Do you love Brahms... or Longing for Romanticism”), prepared by the Great Symphony Orchestra named after P.I. Tchaikovsky and his artistic director Vladimir Fedoseev ( pictured ). In two months, all four symphonies and main concerts of the German composer were performed. The title of Françoise Sagan's novel, which gave the name to the cycle, set many up to expect a meeting with such “Romanticism”, presenting to us in music the quintessence of this style in all its aesthetic, emotional, philosophical, etc. qualities. Thank God, everything turned out to be more complicated.

Vladimir Fedoseev treats the repertoire of his concerts as a zealous collector of the items in his collection. Found once and for all in the process of a long search, suffered, finally acquired, heard in all its phenomenal complexity, he nurtures, cherishes, carefully preserves the masterpieces and from time to time delicately invites us, the listeners, to share delight, love and tenderness with him. Once again he performs a “collectible” opus in some metropolitan concert hall. Over the past ten years, Brahms' symphonies (as well as the symphonies of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich) have been played by the BSO and Fedoseev more than once. And each time I was surprised by the exceptional trust in the opportunity to understand the form in a new way, admiration and admiration for the beauty of all parts, movements, nuances. It’s easier for me to turn to an example from fine art. In 17th-century Flanders, paintings on the theme “The Cabinet of a Lover of Free Arts” were popular. And one must see with what care the brush of Jan van Kessel or Bruegel Velor painted the beaded things placed on the shelves, hung on the walls: all these antique torsos the size of the eye of a needle, gold drops - jewelry, mother-of-pearl squares - paintings by old masters, fleecy rags - tapestries. And this artist’s thoroughness makes it possible, so to speak, with the skin, to tactilely, tactilely feel how the owner of such a collection cared for and cherished his treasures. And he wiped the dust with a velvet cloth.

The BSO does something similar, jewelry-velvet, with dusting of clichéd, or, as Fedoseev himself likes to say, “factory” performances at his concerts. And in the case of Brahms, presenting each opus as the greatest jewel, savoring every movement, every melodic line, every theme made it possible to cleanse the creations of the German genius, paradoxically, precisely from romantic performance cliches. All this finesse and selfless unraveling of complex compositional knots made it possible to hear Brahms as a radical “compositeist” for his time. This is what Charles Rosen wrote about in his essay of the same name to the Fedoseev cycle and the novel by Françoise Sagan: “Brahms was outraged by Wagner’s complex chromatic harmony, but his own harmony, at first glance closer to Mozart’s and Beethoven’s, is in fact no less radical and more dissonant. He expanded the functions of most of the basic traditional harmonies in the most unexpected way... Most of his compositions systematically violate classical methods of composition, and this is all the more disconcerting to the ear because he understood the styles of the past better than all his contemporaries. That is why, for those who listened carefully to Brahms, the revolutionary potential of his innovations is no less explosive than Wagner’s.”

In emotional terms, the Brahms symphonies of the BSO can be characterized by the word “palimpsest”. Where “storm and stress” was expected, an ironic laugh was suddenly heard, and the frivolous dance figures suddenly sparkled with some kind of sublime and at the same time bright melancholy.

Soloists helped Fedoseev and the BSO make a new “facsimile”, collector’s edition of Brahms: violinists Alena Baeva, Tatyana Grindenko, cellist Alexander Knyazev, pianists Elizaveta Leonskaya and the Englishman Frederick Kempff, who had already lost the trust of the public that he had earned after winning the Tchaikovsky competition 1998, but on Sunday, when he was a soloist in the Second Piano Concerto, he returned it - he showed true class and the ability to be a sensitive interlocutor of the BSO.

Sergei KHACHATUROV