Concert with all certainty – Newspaper Kommersant No. 58 (7503) of 04/05/2023

The final concerts of the main program of the 10th Trans-Siberian Art Festival, led by violinist Vadim Repin, are taking place in Novosibirsk and its environs. One of the biggest events of the forum was the world premiere of the Violin Concerto by Mikhail Pletnev, presented by Repin accompanied by the Russian National Orchestra (RNO). Attended the premiere Ilya Ovchinnikov.

A week has passed since Polad Bul-Bul ogly’s Violin Concerto was performed at the Trans-Siberian Art Festival, and here is another premiere. During the ten years of the forum’s existence, Vadim Repin has performed a new composition for violin and orchestra almost every year, but for the first time he presents two in a row. Sophia Gubaidulina, Alexander Raskatov, Mark-Anthony Turnedge, Ilya Demutsky, and Mikhail Pletnev wrote for the Trans-Siberian Railway, it must be admitted, it looks no less unexpected than Bul-Bul ogly. However, Pletnev’s new opus exceeded all expectations, turning out to be the most important statement about the time, about himself and about us.

In the world, Pletnev is known and loved as an outstanding pianist and conductor; as a composer, he is less known, and he himself seems to regard this role with emphatic modesty. Having created the RNO in 1990 and directed it for more than 30 years (half a year ago, the team was headed by Alexander Rudin), Pletnev rarely took the opportunity to present his own music at his console. The only one of its kind was the unforgettable concert of 2007 for the 50th anniversary of the maestro, dedicated only to his compositions, and only in 2014 did he perform them three more times in Moscow. Among them is Fantasia Helvetica for two pianos and orchestra – apparently the only work by Pletnev, the audio recording of which has been officially published, despite the fact that as a performer he is actively recording on the world’s largest labels.

Of Pletnev’s opuses that I have heard before, most sound as if familiar, one way or another reflecting the vast repertoire of the maestro. In this sense, the main thing in the premiere of the Violin Concerto could be a reminder of the personality of Pletnev himself – one of the musicians who for many years played an important role in the cultural life of Russia and continues to play it already because their absence from the country is felt so acutely today. And this would have been a lot, but something much more happened – thanks to Vadim Repin, we heard, perhaps, the best work of Pletnev.

The violin concerto, completed in 2022, was dedicated by the maestro to his friend and colleague Alexei Bruni, until recently the permanent concertmaster of the RNO. According to Bruni, today his health does not allow him to play the premiere – this honor fell to Repin. The Pletnevsky, as the RNO is usually called, was conducted by the Italian Alessandro Kadario, who will also present the Moscow premiere. The novelty was surrounded by two proven masterpieces – after the intermission they played Brahms’ Second Symphony, and began with Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto, one of Repin’s crowning numbers.

Directly comparing a new composition with a recognized masterpiece in the same genre is already a risk, but Pletnev’s concerto did not evoke any feeling like “well, this is not Prokofiev”. As he did not recall his other major works. In most of them, the author seems to be hiding behind the backs of the great predecessors, but here he addresses us in the first person. True, the shadow of Shostakovich periodically appears nearby, reminiscent of itself with reminiscences, intonations, recognizable moves. The choice is not the most obvious – Shostakovich does not seem to belong to the circle of composers closest to Pletnev, although Pletnev’s performances of his symphonies are magnificent: for example, the last – Fifteenth, one of the most gloomy, dreary and hopeless. Perhaps in 2022, Pletnev needed the language of Shostakovich in 1971, especially since in both cases we are talking about 65-year-old composers, no matter how difficult it is to imagine them as peers.

Undoubtedly, the influence of Shostakovich could not be avoided by the generations of composers that followed him, just as the later calls to “kill the DSCH in oneself” were inevitable, throwing the master off the ship of modernity. After that, turning to the language of Shostakovich at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century (if you have not exploited it for decades) is not such a common place. As the musicologist Svetlana Savenko writes, “the assimilation of music to language, speech is nothing more than a metaphor … however, in relation to Shostakovich’s work, this metaphor seems literal. His music really speaks, or rather, it seems to us that it speaks of very specific things. To future listeners, she will say something different, but she will say it anyway.”

Composers of his circle were rarely able to repeat this property of Shostakovich’s music – and Pletnev succeeds: his concerto performed by Repin “talks about very definite things.”

If you suddenly see the first bars of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony (1937), the drum roll from the Seventh (1941) or the timpani beats from the same Fifteenth, then Pletnev not so much quotes as says: “I think so too,” completing the composition with a long and very strange chord from a completely different dimension. With a duration of half an hour, the concerto in three parts rushes by like a moment and is perceived surprisingly whole, having signs of an exemplary “composition of the late period”, when the author comes to music of exceptional purity and clarity. The participation of the Pletnev orchestra also played a role in the success of the concert, inscribing an important page in the history of the Transsib premieres. The Moscow premiere will take place on April 9 at the Tchaikovsky Hall.