Key violin – Newspaper Kommersant No. 52 (7497) dated 03/28/2023

The 10th Trans-Siberian Art Festival, led by violinist Vadim Repin, is taking place in Novosibirsk and other Russian cities. From the very first year, the most important components of its poster were world stars and world premieres. It is difficult with the first ones now, although there are still enough international-class performers, and there are two prime ministers. I visited one of them Ilya Ovchinnikov.

Nine years ago, also at the end of March, the 1st Trans-Siberian Art Festival was opened by the legendary conductor Kent Nagano, who at that time headed the Bavarian Opera and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. According to him, Vadim Repin found the only free day in the maestro’s schedule, persuading him to fly to Novosibirsk between concerts in Madrid and Berlin. The participation of an extra-class conductor immediately set the newborn forum to the highest standard; later Nagano performed at the Trans-Siberian once again along with Valery Gergiev, Charles Duthoit, Jean-Claude Casadesus, Leonard Slatkin and other stellar conductors. Not to mention the soloists, among whom in different years were Thomas Quasthoff, Daniil Trifonov, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Nikolai Lugansky, Gidon Kremer, Dmitry Sitkovetsky, Clara-Jumi Kan, Misha Maisky, Maxim Rysanov and many others.

From the very first festival, the poster has been annually decorated with premieres of compositions, primarily written for Vadim Repin. In Novosibirsk, for the first time in the world, new concerts by Sofia Gubaidulina, Alexander Raskatov, Ilya Demutsky sounded, Arvo Pärt created a new version of his Shroud especially for the Transsib, and the Englishman Mark-Anthony Turnedge – a concerto for two violins and orchestra, intended for Vadim Repin and Daniel Hope. The program of the X festival includes two new concerts; one, owned by Mikhail Pletnev, will be performed for the first time the day after tomorrow in Novosibirsk, and in April in Moscow. Another was presented closer to the beginning of the festival, its author is Polad Bul-Bul oglu, once a legend of the Soviet stage, and now the ambassador of Azerbaijan to Russia.

A few years ago, he performed on the Trans-Siberian Railway as a singer, but now he has returned here as a composer, paradoxically finding himself on a par with Gubaidulina and Pyart. According to the author, the concerto was born from a short “Elegy”, which Repin performed three years ago at the celebration of his 75th birthday; soon the idea arose to make it a lyrical part of a violin concerto. The result was a classic concerto of its kind with two fast and one slow sections. Bul-Bul oglu speaks of continuity, recalling with gratitude his teacher Karu Karaev, who in turn studied with Shostakovich; perhaps their compositions really served as a source of inspiration, but another, no less likely, seems to be the concert of Aram Khachaturian.

Unlike the tragic works of Shostakovich and Karaev, Khachaturian’s concerto is dominated by love of life, invariably defeating any attempt by the author—and performers—to create drama. Against the backdrop of a whole galaxy of innovative violin concertos of those years, Khachaturian’s composition (1940) seems defiantly traditional, which does not prevent him from remaining repertoire decades later. In its own way, Bul-Bul ogly’s concerto is the same with its rich orchestration and almost bluesy intonations in the finale – an honest composition, without false significance and hints of secret meanings where they do not exist. Now his fate depends on the performers, at least Repin and the Novosibirsk Academic Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Sergei Skripka played with genuine pleasure.

Among the successes of the festival is the program “Vadim Repin and friends”, presented in Siberian cities and in Moscow. Formally, its weight is lower than that of other premieres, but it is precisely such a quiet evening that often turns out to be a real treasure, showing that a world-class concert is possible even without foreign stars. The basis of an ideally structured program were two major works by Franck – the Violin Sonata and the Piano Quintet – each of which was preceded by an elegant miniature: the sonata – Fantasia for violin and harp by Saint-Saens, the quintet – Cantilena and Scherzo for harp and Menotti strings, compositions by no means hit. Both pairs turned out to be brightly contrasting, and all four numbers were united by super-saturation with musical events.

The fantasy performed by Repin and Alexandra Tikhonova struck me with absolutely fabulous freedom – both in the way the author interprets the form and in the way the soloists present it. Menotti’s composition began with almost jazzy pizzicatos by cellist Alexander Knyazev, continued with a beautiful harp solo and ended with a series of diverse episodes, where violinist Elena Tarosyan, violist Ilya Tarasenko, and Repin himself flashed. The same team of string players, with pianist Vadim Rudenko, brilliantly performed Frank’s quintet, and his sonata was the highlight of the evening. Written for violin and piano, withstood a number of arrangements, it sounded in a cello version, where Rudenko and Knyazev literally worked wonders. The first notes of the piano seemed to be born on their own, without the participation of hands; in a quarter of an hour, it seemed to us, they had read a whole poem, which turned out to be only a prologue to the drama of the following parts. The most famous sonata was listened to as if for the first time: for the sake of such a miracle, the chamber programs of the festival exist.