Vasilisa Berzhanskaya and Alexey Lyubimov performed at the Arts Square festival

At the XXIII International Festival “Arts Square”, mezzo-soprano Vasilisa Berzhanskaya performed for the first time with arias by Handel and Vivaldi (in the Great Hall of the Philharmonic), and pianist Alexey Lyubimov played in the Small Hall. M. I. Glinka chamber music by Brahms and Silvestrov. Tells Vladimir Dudin.

For the past several years, this festival has already taken place without the participation of Yuri Temirkanov, who, although in home isolation, was still alive. This year the maestro is no more, and therefore, instead of anniversary moods, memorial moods reigned. To paraphrase another Leningrader, Joseph Brodsky, whom the maestro knew and whose poetry highly valued, playing music here became “an exercise in dying.” It was not without reason that the culmination of Vasilisa Berzhanskaya’s performance was Farnac’s famous aria “Gelido in ogni vena” (“The blood runs cold in the veins”) from Vivaldi’s opera Farnac, which fell on the golden section of the concert.

In this aria, the hero reacts to the news of the death of his son, who was for him, albeit difficult, but the meaning of life. The singer and the Pratum integrum orchestra performed it as if in reverse perspective, finding eerie timbres and sound techniques for this – bloodless, as if outside the tonality, chilling tremolos, creating the impression of otherworldliness. Alcina’s aria “Ah mio cor!” also became a concentration of mournful suffering and an expanded metaphor of inconsolable loss. from Handel’s opera of the same name. The powerful sorceress lost the power of her spell, captivated by true love for the knight Ruggiero, who left her forever on a deserted island, passed off as paradise.

Berzhanskaya demonstrated her virtuoso superpowers, mastery of a range of several octaves, space and time of sound capable of accelerating and slowing down the heartbeat of listeners with special courage in arias with contrasting parts (slow-fast-slow). This happened in the motet “In furore iustissimae irae” (“In the fury of righteous anger”) by Vivaldi, and in the aria of Beauty “Un pensiero nemico di pace” (“A thought hostile to the world”) from the oratorio “The Triumph of Time and Disappointment” by Handel. Constanza’s only major aria, “Agitata da due venti” (“Moved by the Two Winds”) from Vivaldi’s “Griselda,” played the role of the main attraction, where the voice competes with the instruments of the orchestra.

Finding herself in Russia today as perhaps the only baroque sorceress-virtuoso, when Cecilia Bartoli, Joyce di Donato, and even such a permanent star as Yulia Lezhneva, who preferred Europe with its developed industry of staging baroque operas, have forgotten their way here for an indefinite period of time, Vasilisa Berzhanskaya takes the rap for everyone. In her timbrally rich sound one could feel a bizarre fusion of one’s own and someone else’s, but there was no doubt that the proper freedom in this repertoire was still ahead of her. If the singer does not leave him: having established herself as a brave all-rounder, she sings today to Massenet, Donizetti, Verdi, Rossini, and Bellini, including even Norma herself.

In recent years, 79-year-old pianist Alexey Lyubimov has, in a sense, been playing the role of Grigory Sokolov in St. Petersburg, who stopped his visits to his hometown with the onset of the pandemic. Although, unlike Grigory Lipmanovich, who always got the Big Hall of the Philharmonic, Alexey Borisovich prefers to perform in the Small Hall. Like Sokolov, Lyubimov composes his programs as an extended cultural and historical essay, a selection of “essays on the topic,” establishing connections between the past and the present, initially infecting the audience with an impulse for philosophical and critical understanding. In the new program, he combined the music of composers who had never known each other, but thought in the paradigm of romanticism, only Brahms was synchronous with it, and many years later Valentin Silvestrov worked as a restorer – with the prefix “post-”.

Having started the program with Brahms’ Intermezzo, Lyubimov prefaced Silvestrov’s plays with a short, extremely precise professorial commentary on what “Kitsch music” is and this very post-romanticism in general. “This music turns us into beauty, but this is not an imitation of beauty, but a metaphor for a musical language that belonged to all eras, languages, countries. This is a memory of the miracle that music is in before it was born. This language was invented long ago, there will be nothing new, but you can remember deep emotions, connections with the soul, memory. Kitsch music is not an ironic name, but a direct metaphor for music steeped in tradition. Silvestrov calls his plays “moments,” they hang, they begin, but do not end.” Framing the performance with Brahms – his Fantasies op. 116 and Intermezzo op. 117 and Rhapsodies op. 79, inside the program Lyubimov hid a large corpus of Silvestrov’s works, most of which were written in the 1970s, when he, expelled from the Union of Composers in 1970, turned with his “Silent Music” towards post-romanticism. According to the composer, “avant-garde is also the ability to escape from the avant-garde.”

After “Kitsch Music” and the suite “February 3, 1957. In memory of M.I. Glinka”, which completed the first part, the second began with “Autumn Serenade”, continued with “Three Bagatelles” and “Four Pieces”, and ended with two plays “Berlin 2023”. In these metaphors one could hear not so much a “metaphor of the language of romanticism” as a highly refined, ringing Aesopian language for those who understand, of whom there were quite a few in the Small Hall of the Philharmonic. If Lyubimov imbued Brahms’ miniatures with symphonic density, effectively registering, finding different densities, extracting different colors from the piano, filled with earthly emotions and feelings, passions, then he made Silvestrov’s music ethereal – almost the music of the celestial spheres, turning them into aphorisms in the spirit of “Flowers” » Francis of Assisi. It was a real round dance of the spirits of Chopin, Schumann, Brahms, two Richards – Wagner and Strauss, and even a little Grieg. And in the suite in memory of Glinka, charming in its disarming simplicity, the composer made it clear how beautiful and free the bird’s language is, focusing on a direct quotation from the ingenuous, but winged, flying “Lark” with its “Between heaven and earth, a song is heard.”