Interwar spring – Newspaper Kommersant No. 60 (7505) dated 04/07/2023

In St. Petersburg (on the stage of the Great Hall of the Philharmonic) and Moscow (in the Great Hall of the Conservatory), concerts of the musicAeterna orchestra and choir took place. Teodor Currentzis conducted Igor Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms (1930) and his own Persephone (1934), a melodrama for an orator, soloist, dancers, choir and orchestra. About the St. Petersburg concert, where actress Ksenia Rappoport performed the role of Persephone, tells Vladimir Dudin.

Teodor Currentzis, having settled in the St. Petersburg House of Radio, methodically, from concert to concert in the Great Philharmonic Hall or the Academic Chapel, teaches that there are no passing, random programs: each one fixes the temperature of Time. In his long and happy Permian period, he carelessly, almost like a child, allowed himself whatever he liked, resorting to opera, ballet, symphony resources, inviting musicians, directors and artists from abroad to his projects. Having moved to the banks of the Neva and found himself in complicated historical circumstances, starting with the pandemic, the maestro became more economical in terms of funds and counts his every appearance on the big stage as a major statement. Such were Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Symphony, exploring the phenomenon of death, the program “Quiet Music” from the slow parts of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Ravel, Shostakovich, Barber and Pyart, which they performed together with pianist Polina Osetinskaya in the dark hall of the Chapel.

“Symphony of Psalms” and “Persephone” by Stravinsky, written one after another, Currentzis staged in one evening for a reason. Both works, which for the convenience of the catalog are labeled “neoclassicist period”, represent a bizarre synthesis of secular and spiritual, sacred and profane, while at the same time testifying to the diversity of religious experience. The “Symphony of Psalms”, as the name suggests, grew up on the conjugation of symphonic and oratorio genres: in the “Chronicle of my musical life” the composer wrote that “the form of the symphony, bequeathed by the 19th century” did not interest him much, but he wanted to create “something organically integral”, based on “great contrapuntal development”. Reflecting on the sound of the future opus, he decided to combine the choral and instrumental ensembles, remembering the “views of the old masters.” Psalms 38, 39 and 150 became texts, and the result of experimental synthesis was a new stage in the development of the vocal symphony, which opened its doors wide in the 20th century to Pärt, Britten, Penderecki. The psalms, accompanied by an orchestra, responded to the modernist-archaic discourse in line with the Eurasianism of the 1930s, simultaneously reflecting the search for ecumenism and the new religiosity of the interwar period.

Fortunately, the composer received complete freedom of choice of artistic means from his friend Sergei Koussevitzky, who commissioned him for the 50th anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and subsequently conducted the premiere. In the non-classical composition of the orchestra of strings – only double basses, the rest – groups of woodwinds and brass, two pianos, as well as male, female and children’s choirs. With Teodor Currentzis, freedom gravitated toward a conscious necessity: the conductor, beat by beat, consistently focused on the balance and proportion of the details and the whole, on the slowness and meditativeness of the unfolding of the musical fabric. But he was fond of the procedural nature of dramaturgy and made it easy for the listener to recognize in this score the author of The Wedding and The Rite of Spring. In the first two psalms, the earnestness, tension and nervousness of the prayer were keenly felt (“Give me relief so that I can rest before I go away and there will be no more me”, “many will see and be afraid, and they will hope in the Lord”). The third movement with the 150th psalm (Laudate Dominum, “Praise God in his saints”) completely removed this tension, as if releasing sins at the moment of the openly melodic Hallelujah, which recalled the melodism of Verdi’s Requiem.

The tender, French-style refined Persephone (which Stravinsky writes about in 1934 in his Chronicle of My Life as his last composition, although there was still a lot of new music ahead of him) was worth performing on the St. to hear the voice of actress Xenia Rappoport as the goddess of fertility and the underworld. Stravinsky’s melodrama to a libretto by André Gide was previously performed by Teodor Currentzis more than once in Perm, as well as at the Teatro Real in Madrid: back then, when Gerard Mortier was in charge of the theatre, Persephone together with Tchaikovsky’s Iolanthe was staged by Peter Sellars. But now the whole text, which grew out of the ancient hymn to Demeter, sounded especially stunning: the mysteries of the ancient Eleusinian mysteries suddenly received a completely different, somewhat Aesopian subtext. “Where have you gone, smells, songs, messengers of Love? I only see dead leaves. Meadows without flowers and empty fields mourn the merry season. Everything around seems to be moaning for a long time, everything around is waiting for the return of spring, ”says Persephone.

Once this heroine was played by Ida Rubinstein, at whose request Persephone was written – she combined the roles of a dancer in the bosom of her Parisian troupe and a reader. With her sensually decadent recitation in French, Ksenia Rappoport recalled how many years ago she appeared on the stage of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic in the role of Joan of Arc in Honegger’s oratorio Joan of Arc at the stake together with the team of Teodor Currentzis). The maestro did everything to ensure that the huge composition of the orchestra and choir created the impression of the inner fullness of Persephone’s speech, arranged the musicality of her presence. In this halo, the new tenor Yegor Semenkov also seemed interesting as Eumolpus, the priest of Demeter, who fit perfectly into the style. Persephone uttered her last remark in Russian: “I saw what is happening there, what is hidden from the light of day, and I cannot forget the sad truth … Not the law, but my love leads me, and I step by step go down the steps that lead into the depths of human despair.”