Sound-visual effects are not so common in avant-garde music: it is believed that they have become obsolete along with naive romanticism. However, Morton Feldman, when he wrote the play “Madame Press Died Last Week at the Age of 90” in memory of his Russian teacher Vera Ivanovna Maurina-Press in 1970, ordered the flute to honestly crow 90 times in a row.

Echo of Perm

This piece was performed at the Zaryadye Hall in Moscow by the Gustav Mahler Chamber Orchestra conducted by Teodor Currentzis. The Moscow concert was a repeat of the away concert - the closing of the Diaghilev Festival in Perm. The program of both concerts also included Brahms' Viola Rhapsody, which the distressed composer wrote for the wedding of Julia Schumann, a girl he more than liked, and his German Requiem - a stern, grandiose, sincere piece, begun under the impression of the death of Robert Schumann and completed in feelings caused by the death of the composer's mother.

As is often the case with Currentzis, the farewell and funeral theme did not at all mean a sad or even simply sour tone of the concerts themselves. On the contrary, they were on an upswing, and that always accompanies the happiness of playing music together. The slender musicAeterna choir, which consisted of about sixty choristers, was accompanied by the international Mahler Chamber Orchestra, which included only 55 musicians. For chamber music this is a lot, but for Brahms’s German Requiem any other conductor would have had a cast one and a half times larger. Playing symphonic choral compositions as ensembles composed of soloists is a skill inherent in modern-minded musicians. Currentzis and his associates are among the leaders in this area. Brahms's spare and sad music becomes transparent in its strict simplicity, but loses neither beauty nor sound power.

Nikita Chuntomov Nikita Chuntomov Nikita Chuntomov Nikita Chuntomov Nikita Chuntomov

Two Orthodoxies

Another group, which Currentzis founded last year in Greece, showed similar qualities at the Diaghilev Festival. This is the ByzantiAeterna choir, led by the Greek choirmaster Antonios Koutroupis, who, like Currentzis, studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. Just twelve men - singers - perform ancient Byzantine hymns and sound like a large choir. Meanwhile, they sing with filigree, emphasizing the intricate decorations in the melodic line and systematically splitting it into parallel, slightly mismatched flows - as happens in the delta.

Byzantine church music has neither age nor author - it is the beautiful breath of Orthodoxy itself, embracing souls. On one of the festival evenings, Greek hymns were included in the same program with the music of a brightly individual author, although also Orthodox - Arvo Pärt. Half a century ago, Pärt came up with his own very special style of tintinnabuli in the Soviet Union, similar at the same time to the music of the Renaissance and to the systematic techniques of the late twentieth century. The pathos of Pärt’s loner lay in his opposition to the dogmas of the avant-garde, which by the early 1970s had already become boring to many. Today, at the Diaghilev Festival, his personal fantasies are combined with the impersonal artifacts of church tradition, and in the face of eternity, this is, perhaps, more right than wrong. Both choirs, Permian and Greek, sang on the stage of the theater in turn, moving from De Profundis, written by Pärt to the text of a Latin psalm, to the traditional Byzantine Phos Hilaron (“Quiet Light”), and ending with Pärt’s song “In the Mountains is My Heart” to poetry Robert Burns, during the performance of which the choir periodically tried to illuminate the darkness of the stage with mobile phone flashlights.

Copper army

The somewhat tiresome seriousness of the choral program, called Festina Lente - after one of Pärt's instrumental works, the festival listener could cure by going to the Perm Organ Hall for a concert by an international brass ensemble made up of brass players who came from all over for the festival. The leader of the project was the German trumpeter, prominent professor Matthias Höfs, and the ringleader and witty entertainer was his Russian colleague Pavel Kurdakov. Four trumpet players, two horn players, three trombonists and a tuba player: there is practically no ready-made music for such a line-up, so the program has turned into a championship of arrangements. The first part featured transcriptions of vocal and operatic music (from Bach to Wagner), which was played on modern brass instruments with varying degrees of success. But for the second part, where they performed music from films (existing and non-existing), there were no questions: the brilliance of the arrangements was complemented by a parade of instruments that changed in the hands of the musicians (which was worth the modern modification of the ancient hunting horn with four gates, on which Professor Hoefs played the solo) , the artists alternated spectacular solos with emphasized respect for each other.

Edward Tikhonov Edward Tikhonov Edward Tikhonov Edward Tikhonov Edward Tikhonov Edward Tikhonov Edward Tikhonov

Don't forget the avant-garde

Meanwhile, the avant-garde has not gone away, and there is always a place for it at the Diaghilev Festival. Few play the avant-garde as skillfully as the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble: this time, however, they paired industry titan Iannis Xenakis, newer Fausto Romitelli and Salvatore Sciarrino with a 14th-century composer in their program. Guillaume de Machaut. The 65-year-old Austrian Georg Friedrich Haas, who according to some ratings is now considered the number one composer in the whole world, was present at the festival as a resident composer. At concerts and master classes, he appeared in the company of his mulatto wife, a BDSM instructor by profession, whom the composer recently met via the Internet. At the MASM concert, following Guillaume de Machaut, a piece by Haas was performed, written as a recomposition of the music of another great polyphonist, Josquin Despres. As we see, historical and modern trends in Perm are perfectly intertwined.

Don't forget the classics

Traditional classics are also at ease here: pianist Alexey Goribol and singer Nadezhda Pavlova performed a program of German chamber lyrics at the Triumph Private Philharmonic - from Schubert and Schumann to Schoenberg and Zemlinsky. During the concert, the faces of the composers appeared on the screen, and the young and beautiful Brahms, the future author of the German Requiem, appeared in several versions. According to one version, Schumann was silently but deeply jealous of not only Clara for Brahms, but also Brahms for Clara, which cost him his mental health. Similar feelings overwhelmed the hero of “Death in Venice”: to give his partner a break, Goribol performed the famous Adagietto solo from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. Goribol played, suffering from the fact that he received an unimportant piano; at the same time, the video projector showed us the hero of Thomas Mann and Luchino Visconti, performed by Dirk Bogarde, suffering at the sight of the beautiful Tadzio, offended by a rude peer.

Nikita Chuntomov Nikita Chuntomov Nikita Chuntomov Nikita Chuntomov Nikita Chuntomov Nikita Chuntomov

Perm – Salzburg

What was not at the Diaghilevsky this year was an opera premiere: Berg’s planned “Lulu” had to be postponed to the next festival for financial reasons. But there was a concert performance of Mozart’s Idomeneo: Currentzis will give this opera in the summer in Salzburg, where Peter Sellars will stage it. Among the psalms and requiems, the Perm maestro did not forget the road to youth, superbly playing an operatic example created by the 24-year-old Mozart. In the finale of the opera, the gods have mercy on Idomeneo: he may not sacrifice his own son (although the glorious young man himself is ready to die), but must give up the throne to him.

Young blood was not shed at the festival, but successfully boiled up. The title role was sung very nicely by tenor Sergei Godin, and the two prima donnas received the most applause. One was Eleonora Buratto, who sang the furious Electra temperamentally and irresistibly, the other was Yin Fan, who turned out to be an incredibly poetic Ilia. A graduate of both the Shanghai Conservatory and the Juilliard School in New York, the young artist showed amazing taste, the beauty of her voice and such a keen understanding of European culture that it became abundantly clear why she was chosen to sing with Currentzis in Salzburg. Her path there lay through Perm.

Why did the cuckoo crow in Zaryadye?