Bicycle bells – Newspaper Kommersant No. 67 (7512) dated 04/18/2023

The Russian National Youth Symphony Orchestra conducted by Philip Chizhevsky performed on the stage of the Tchaikovsky Hall György Ligeti’s Requiem and Alexey Sysoev’s Spheres — a concerto for piano, vibraphone and orchestra. About two difficult premieres, world and Russian, tells Ekaterina Biryukova.

The premieres completed the philharmonic subscription “Another Space. Continuo”, which is an echo of the local contemporary music festival of the same name. For the first time in Russia, the Requiem by György Ligeti was performed – a gloomy, low-lifting masterpiece of the era of the post-war avant-garde, although it became famous in its time thanks to Stanley Kubrick’s A Space Odyssey 2001, but it requires two hundred performers on stage and therefore is performed infrequently. In addition to him in the program was a completely fresh, specially commissioned work “Sphere” by the Moscow composer Alexei Sysoev, written from March to December 2022, also crowded and sad. Of course, both of these events will go down in the annals of the most important achievements of the Moscow Philharmonic, and there is a possibility that Sysoev is the first number, and not the second.

It is not often that a contemporary composer is given the opportunity to work with a large orchestra and is given complete carte blanche. But here is just such a case (it must be said that it is even rarer for a modern composer to have important premieres two days in a row, but the day before the Moscow concert, the ballet Sextus Propertius appeared in Yekaterinburg to the music of Alexei Sysoev, staged by Vyacheslav Samodurov). Spheres is a Concerto for piano (at which the composer’s longtime collaborator Yuri Favorin sits), vibraphone (behind which stands Andrey Volosovsky), the Russian National Youth Symphony Orchestra, directed by Philip Chizhevsky, and the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall with a huge bowl of its amphitheater. According to the composer, the composition of the participants should be exactly like this. The listener is inside a finely organized, ringing, rumbling, clanging, exploding, or painfully fading sphere of sounds, describing either the external world or an internal cry. The author does not insist on any particular program, and neither will we. A very bright and open emotion is enough, from which it is impossible to hide.

From solo pianos gleaming with glass and metal with a vibraphone, sound circles diverge deep into the orchestra – to harps standing on the proscenium, further – to strings, even further – to wind instruments. Among the huge instrumentation, eight bicycles stand out, standing upside down in the back of the stage, next to the drums. This is not a joke or pop art. There is nothing healthy and sporty in the sound of spinning pedals, only an alarming inevitability spreading through the hall. In the final, 120 orchestra members take out 120 smartphones with a bicycle buzz pre-recorded on them (each has its own duration), add it to the existing one, turn on flashlight candles on their devices, descend from the stage and disperse around the amphitheater, enclosing the audience in sound and light trap. Even when the couple of soloists remaining on the stage falls silent, this buzzing moment of silence continues. Applause is possible only after the last smartphone is silent (it’s hard not to remember Ligeti’s Symphonic Poem for 100 metronomes). The reaction of the full house, which gave “Spheres” an incredible ovation, shows that our contemporary composers seem to have something to talk about with the audience.

With Ligeti’s Requiem, everything turned out to be somewhat different. It has long been known that this is a terrible, dark composition. “This is a requiem for all mankind,” the composer himself said of him, explaining why he abandoned those parts of the canonical funeral mass where there is at least some glimmer of hope, “Sanctus” and “Agnus Dei”: – “Dies irae” with its inherent drama – the center of my work, appealing to the images of the Last Judgment. A Hungarian Jew who lost most of his family in concentration camps, Ligeti wrote his Requiem 20 years after the end of World War II, armed with pain and sophisticated avant-garde techniques. One of them is micropolyphony, which is a dense bundle of similar, but still different musical motifs. In the huge composition of his work, the choir plays the most important role, in which there must be at least 100 people. And sometimes 20 parties sound at the same time in it.

The Russian premiere of “Requiem”, this year dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the composer, in fact, was prepared for more than one year, but for one reason or another fell through. One of the obstacles was covid, which banned large gatherings of people. The current event, of course, is very, very long-awaited, and it also counts for the inquisitive Youth Orchestra and maestro Chizhevsky, open to all winds. Two intricate solo parts were sung by Polina Panina and Maqueda Monnet, discharged from France (a unique case in modern times). The main blow was diligently, but somehow timidly taken by two adult and respected groups – the State Academic Choir of Russia named after Yurlov and the State Academic Choir named after Sveshnikov. The complex avant-garde technique was audible, but the pain was not so much. The result was more of a distant, faded fresco than a bleeding document.