The ensemble Nostri Temporis played experimental premieres

Concert/classical

The Solo Nostri Temporis II concert took place in the assembly hall of the National Academy of Arts. The program included solo plays by young Ukrainian and Russian composers, united by an irrepressible desire to expand performing capabilities. Following the concert, LYUBOV MOROZOVA reflects on the organic fusion of traditional and innovative instrument playing techniques in fresh scores.

For the first time, Ukrainian composers began to experiment in the field of new sounds in the 1960s. Valentin Silvestrov, Vitaly Godzyatsky and Leonid Grabovsky threw glass glasses onto the piano strings, rattled pots and burned matches with a crash. These experiments were more like entertainment than a methodical study of the capabilities of musical instruments. Of course, over time, they all gave up on pranks and even swore off being distracted by them. A new wave of passion for avant-garde techniques came in the 1990s. Passing from mouth to mouth stories and anecdotes about how at major European festivals - "Warsaw Autumn" and new music courses in Darmstadt - performers pour water from copper bells and smash pianos with an ax, composers also tried their hand at "taming the obstinate" - mainly in the genre of musical performance.

We are seeing the third wave of this process today, and at its crest are young authors, educated not so much by the conservatory as by specialized Internet communities that encourage the study of scores by modern composers of the Western European school and serious research works devoted to innovative playing techniques. The latter are often written by the most significant instrumentalists (for example, Karin Levine’s guide to flute playing or Peter Wiel’s guide to oboe playing), and therefore it is impossible for a composer who speaks in modern musical language to do without them.

The current concert, which included six world and two Ukrainian premieres, demonstrated the organic way with which new techniques entered the vocabulary of young composers, allowing them to create completely different works. Anna Arkushina's 410-escape score for oboe, built on the wave principle, performed by Maxim Kolomiets, was noted for its intensive use of innovations. This work was like a detailed collage, in which even repeating motifs are assembled from pieces of different colors and textures, but at the same time the plot of the canvas remains naive and sweet.

In contrast, “Cleavage” for clarinet by Nikolai Khrust, performed by Alexei Boyko, used a minimum of techniques, but each of them had such a number of nuances that can only be compared with the number of words denoting shades of snow among the Eskimos. The splitting of tones up to the eighth part, the performer singing vowels in their English, German, French and Finnish pronunciation, the division of the melodic line into two layers - an instrumental sound and a human voice imitating it - all this was reminiscent of looking under a microscope at a galaxy that has settled in a drop of water.

The piece Pulsar by Alexander Khubeyev, played by clarinetist Dmitry Pashinsky, was also distinguished by its careful attitude to the use of extremist techniques. In it, the composer used simpler and more understandable means of expression - a kind of dialogue sounded between the ordinary voice of the instrument and its multiphonics - specially produced overtones. All this happened, in accordance with the name, in the nature of non-stop pulsations of various tempos, timbres and types.

The starting points for sound experiments in the other three scores were historical figures and fauna. Thus, to write the flute piece Flight, George Benjamin drew inspiration from the cries and flight of birds. Alexandra Filonenko, in a violin homage to Alfred Schnittke, based on the sound world of his string trio, created a suite imbued with Schnittkean expression, and Dmitry Radzetsky played his “Lenin in Zero Gravity” on a 10-string guitar and electronics. In a witty annotation, the author and performer mentioned that since human height increases by 5 cm in zero gravity, then the 165-centimeter Vladimir Lenin in zero gravity is equal to the 170-centimeter Bruce Lee on Earth, from which he made the surreal conclusion that the latter was the reincarnation of Lenin.

In addition to the scores mentioned, a flute piece by Mark Buloshnikov and an alto “War” by Alexei Shmurak, also refreshed by unconventional playing techniques, were performed. In principle, a solo concert, which lasted more than an hour and a half without a break, otherwise threatened to become tiring for the listener, but here, thanks to the diversity of sounds, it turned into a good analogue of a symphony.

Oboe, water and copper pipes