The performance “Memory of the Sun” took place at the House of Music

In the Chamber Hall of the International House of Music, the literary and musical performance “Memory” was held to a full house.

about the sun.” Two divas – singer Nina Shatskaya and actress Olga Kabo – accompanied by a symphony orchestra conducted by maestro Felix Aranovsky held the hall for two hours

in a state of high emotional stress. The main character this evening was the great poetry of Anna Akhmatova.

Laconic stage design: a symphony orchestra, an undraped backdrop, two microphones on the proscenium. There is a request to the audience not to interrupt the action with applause. Because this is not a concert—it’s a performance in which the dramaturgy is strictly structured in accordance with Anna Akhmatova’s first poem “By the Sea.” The asceticism of the form chosen by director Zhzhenova is a principle here: external effects, complex techniques… – nothing should distract the audience from the verse as such and embodied in music.

Olga Kabo reads a poem: “The bays cut up the low shore/All the sails fled into the sea/And I dried the salted spit/A mile from the ground on a flat stone…” She begins calmly, even lightly, and Nina Shatskaya picks up, naturally, vocally, already in the first number with intonation and gesture indicating the future drama. But the cohesion of these elements is such that you cannot break it, you cannot pause… Perhaps, if the audience had not been warned about the ban on clapping, they would not have happened: the artists and the orchestra, from the first words, from the first bars, manage to establish the law of their artistic expression – this is a single a flow of inspiration, emotions, tears, hopes, dreams and inevitable tragedy.

This was Anna Andreevna Akhmatova’s worldview, starting from her first early opuses, which included the poem “By the Sea itself,” written in 1914. And the actresses present this Akhmatovian world to the audience as their own – personal, lived, cried. There is no detachment or defamiliarization here. Shatskaya and Kabo become direct transmitters of the poetess’s inner world—the word and its melodic sound. And even the appearance of the artists – both beauties, slender, tall, “covered in silks” like Blok, in identical stylish black dresses with different capes (gray for Shatskaya, turquoise for Kabo) was “Akhmatovian”: strict and luxurious at the same time.

The first part of the performance – “By the Sea” – was built by composer Zlata Razdolina in the style of Russian modernism. Yes, this is 25-year-old Akhmatova in the 10s: Fountain House, the Stray Dog cabaret, sinful romances for three, decadence and the feeling of death as an artistic act. Nina Shatskaya seems to be stylizing her singing “like Vertinsky.” Each vocal number is a mini-performance, a plot, a destiny. Hence – a certain mannerism, an abundance of nasal vowels, transitions from recitative to vocalization, from low notes on a subtone to the powerful sound of the voice in all its fullness on a forte in a high tessitura. And, of course, Shatskaya’s signature detail is the graceful wringing of her long, flexible, swan-like arms.

All songs are minor. There are almost no contrasts – the music moves in a single chanson-dramatic key. And only the jazz trumpet brings a special flavor to the dream world of the heroine, a wild girl waiting for her gray-eyed prince, who will not come – because he is dead.

The poem contains the image of the heroine’s sister, the bedridden twin of the “wild girl.” And here in many ways lies the answer to the psychological characteristics of the poetess: all three of Anna Andreevna’s sisters died in childhood and adolescence from tuberculosis. Nevertheless, the musical embodiment of the poem, as Shatskaya interprets it, is not depressive, but rather ecstatic. And tragedy is not the end of life, but its feeding with strange, either devilish or divine energy.

The second act is Akhmatova’s famous “Requiem”. And here the singer becomes completely different. Because Akhmatova is different here too. An adult, unconquered, having experienced not only personal dramas, but the fate of her country, her people, from whom she never separated herself. This brilliant poetess survived three wars, managing to rise in her poems to the expression of general, and not just her own, pain. And this image of Shatskaya manages to reveal almost more and stronger than the previous one. Perhaps the reasons for this are in the context of the reception of “Requiem” today.

Razdolina’s music is quite simple – simpler than in the vocal numbers of the first act. Lots of repetitions, rather common intonations. Development is carried out through texture and instrumental timbres – the orchestra takes on the main function of dramatic development. And he does it very professionally: Maestro Aranovsky energetically leads the musicians of the Russian Police Orchestra, who enthusiastically perform the rich score. And this is the point: the heroine, the poetic text, and the actor’s intonation come to the fore.

The audience receives “Requiem” with bated breath. The last chord hangs in the air – the audience does not immediately return to reality, which today most closely rhymes with the world into which three women immersed us: Anna Akhmatova, Nina Shatskaya and Olga Kabo.

Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 29145 dated October 27, 2023

Newspaper headline:
Nina Shatskaya and Olga Kabo near the sea