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SOFIA GUBAIDULINA: THE HARMONY OF THE WORLD

On October 24 the internationally famous Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina turned 70. A festival of Gubaidulina's music, timed to her jubilee, was held in Moscow last week.
Gubaidulina was born in the Russian republic of Tatarstan in 1931. After graduating from the Kazan and Moscow Conservatories, she became a freelance composer. Independent-minded and self-determined, she developed her own, original style, shaped by the late 1960s, and has remained faithful to it throughout the past 4 decades. Having found her theme, a subject for creative research, she devoted herself entirely to it - a lonely human soul struggling to comprehend itself, isolated from the outer world and yearning for dialogue with its Creator. This theme is most pronounced in "The Hour Of Soul" oratorio, "The Night In Memphis" and "Perception" chamber cantatas.
Gubaidulina's style stems from her perfect command of all composition techniques known to this day, on the one hand, and from her boundless fantasy and intuition, enabling her to see the unusual in ordinary things, find new forms of sound extraction and enrich her musical palette. Gubaidulina treats every instrument as a "living creature" with its own character and untapped opportunities. Her music, sincere and expressive, with subtle undertones and inner harmony, penetrates to the bottom of human heart.
Gubaidulina stands out among 20th century composers as an incomparable master of refined chamber pieces. From the instrumental point of view they are absolutely unique. For instance, she gives solo parts to such instruments as the contrabass, bassoon or, say, kettledrum, which are traditionally regarded as support instruments. By her own accord, a music piece resembles a newly-born child that must be given a name. There are no "chance" names. For instance, the dramatic plot of her violin concerto "Offertorium" (Sacrifice) is conveyed through gradual, note-by-note buildups and disappearances of the main theme. In the finale it again picks up, acquiring eternal life.
Gubaidulina's later works reveal increasing dramatism, emotional tension and apocalyptic sentiments ("The Seven Words Of Crucified Christ" concerto for cello, bayan and the strings).
Since the mid-1980s she turns more often to monumental music. Her symphonies "Stimmen…-Verstummen …" and "The Figures OF Time", and her "Alleluia" oratorio rank among the most significant symphonic pieces created in the 20th century. Gubaidulina's largest work is the "St. John Passions" oratorio, commissioned to her by the Bach academy in Stuttgart in 2000 for the 250th death anniversary of Johann Sebastian Bach. By focusing on passages from the Gospel, which served the basis for "St. John Passions", Gubaidulina unveiled the key avenues of her creative drive.
"I feel that St. John's Gospel is what people need most nowadays and that it ought to be sung", says Gubaidulina. "The most important question brought up in St. John's Gospel is concern over the destinies of the world shared by God and humanity; concern over what the world needs and what Jesus Christ's sufferings mean to the world and to Creator" .
 

GALINA VISHNEVSKAYA - A RUSSIAN OPERA DIVA
(to her 75th birthday)

On October 25 the renowned Russian mezzo-soprano Galina Vishnevskaya turned 75. "Not a moment in my life I was dissatisfied with my destiny", Vishnevskaya said in one of her recent interviews. Her career split into two periods - before 1974 when she was a leading soloist at Moscow's Bolshoi Theatre and a Soviet opera prima donna; and after 1974 when she and her husband, the world-famous cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, were forced to leave the USSR for political reasons.
In 1990 Vishnevskaya and Rostropovich regained Russian citizenship. The couple is known for its numerous public and cultural projects in Russia and abroad.
Galina Vishnevskaya sang ever since she can remember herself. At 17 she entered the Operetta Theatre in her native St.-Petersburg. At 26 (1952) - with no professional training (the stage was her conservatory) - she crossed the threshold of the Bolshoi and literally burst into top performers' list. The celebrated opera producer Boris Pokrovsky recalls: "This young, beautiful and clever woman with extraordinary musical and vocal abilities, theatrical charm, hot temperament, natural feeling of the stage, and bold outspokenness seemed to have come down from heaven to test our artistic intuition. She could perform any part with top-class professionalism."
"I rehearsed my first parts with conductor Alexander Melik-Pashayev", Vishnevskaya says. "What a conductor he was! He was the first in Russia to stage Beethoven's only opera "Fidelio". And he gave me, a former operetta singer, the part of Leonora. I became his favorite singer. Then I worked for many years with Boris Pokrovsky, with whom I did all my roles at the Bolshoi. Meeting such wonderful people was my only God-given privilege".
Over 22 years of her career at the Bolshoi Vishnevskaya created lots of unforgettable images in Russian and West-European operas, premiering a new part by each New Year's Day. Possessing a unique combination of natural vocal skills and artistic talent, she was destined to be a prima donna. She was also a hard-worker and could go on rehearsing for hours on end. Every performance was a grand occasion for her.
Speaking about the second part of her career, Vishnevskaya said in an interview: "What did life in the West give me? I came with a 30-year of stage experience. I decided to carry on as long as I could. I sang many chamber concerts, especially during the first 10 years, and performed at opera theatres. The last time I appeared on stage was at my farewell performance at the Grand-Opera in Paris in 1982. I sang the part of Tatiana in Tchaikovsky's opera "Yevgeny Onegin" conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich. Later we recorded a full version of Sergei Prokovief's opera "War And Peace" and 5 CDs featuring romances by Russian classical composers: Glinka, Dargomyzhsky, Musorgsky, Borodin and Tchaikovsky".
Galina Vishnevskaya assists her husband in the presentation of her favorite opera by Dmitry Shostakovich "Lady Macbeth of Msensk" starring Russian performers singing in Russian. The opera has had a successful run in Madrid, Munich, Dijon and Buenos Aires and will be premiered in Rome in January 2002.
Vishevskaya celebrated her jubilee in Moscow. Ever beautiful and charming, always at her best, she has launched a regular charity project - the construction of a Moscow opera school that would boast an excellent teaching staff. "A singer needs a good teacher, otherwise he won't become a personality", Vishevskaya believes. "One needs a deep-level communication with the spiritual world of his teacher, absorbing it intuitively and then unfold it your own way. I was lucky to have wonderful teachers: composers Dmitry Shostakovich, Benjamin Britten, conductors Melik-Pashayev and Rostropovich, director Boris Pokrovsky, and my partners on stage. Without them I would have never made such a brilliant career" .
 

MAETERLINCK AND "THE SILVER AGE"
(an anthology of the Belgian author's literary and drama heritage)

An anthology featuring the heritage of the well-known Belgian writer, dramatist and philosopher, and a Nobel Prize laureate Maurice Maeterlinck has come out in Moscow. Maeterlinck exerted profound influence on Russian authors of the late 19th, the early 20th century, a period known as the "Silver Age" of Russian of literature.
"Maeterlinck stole the hero from Western drama, turned human voice into husky whisper and people into dolls, deprived them of the freedom of movement, light, air, willpower…", poet Alexander Blok, a translator of Maeterlinck's poetry and one of his first followers in Russia, wrote in 1907. "But having done all that, he opened a door through which we can hear the sound of a pure and crystal art-fall".
Maeterlinck's "The Blind", "The Miracle of Saint Anthony" and "Joyzelle" are deeply philosophic and pervaded with the eternal idea of superiority of the good over the evil. Largely underestimated in the pragmatic-minded West, his prose and drama evoked a lively response in Russia. His influence manifests itself in poetry by Igor Severyanin, Konstantin Balmont, Valery Brusov and other "Silver Age" authors.
Says Natalya Marusyak, a critic and one of the authors of the anthology: "An important point to make is Russian writers didn't imitate Maeterlinck, but some way or other, their works bear strong evidence of his influence. One can describe this in terms of "the Russian Maeterlinck phenomenon".
A philosopher of the tragedy, as he was called by the outstanding Russian scholar and religious thinker Nikolai Berdiayev, Maeterlinck felt the change of epochs, the loss of the old values, while the ones were yet to emerge, more acutely than other Western authors, which made him closer to the turn-of-the-century Russian literature pervaded with the same spirit of hopelessness that is not to be found in earlier or later works.
"The Blue Bird", a fairy tale for adults, stands out among Maeterlinck's plays as an attempt to tear us away from our illusory dreams and, through the comprehension of simple truths, bring us back into the world of real life. Russian writers were quick to catch his idea of the transience of existence. For them the "Blue Bird" came to symbolize a future Russia - ideal, beautiful and unattainable. Grigory Kruzhkov, a researcher of Anna Akhmatova's poetry, believes that the tragic aspect of her lyrics stems from Maeterlinck's philosophy.
On September 30, 1908, the world-famous Russian theatre director Konstantin Stanislavsky premiered his stage version of "The Blue Bird". In his letter to Maeterlinck he wrote that the play became a dream-production with Moscow children", to which Maeterlinck replied a month later: "I new I owed you much, but now I see that I owe you all. I wish I could bow before the purest and greatest theatre artist of all times and offer him my heartfelt gratitude".
"Maeterlinck's plays allowed for experiments in the search for new stage forms", Natalya Marusyak says. "His prose and poetry inspired directors and composers. Ilya Sats wrote an opera adaptation of "The Blue Bird" and Sergei Rakhmaninov left behind scores of his unfinished opera to Maeterlinck's drama "Monna Vanna". To these one should add "Joyzelle" set to music by Nickolai Cherepnin as well as Alexander Grechaninov's piece "Sister Beatrice" and Sergei Taneyev's "Echos" - all based on Maeterlinck's works .

 THE NIKOLAI RERIKH MUSEUM IN MOSCOW

 
Moscow's Nikolai Rerikh Museum, opened in 1997 by the famous painter's son Svyatoslav, a well-known painter and prominent public figure, has become a major art and cultural center, a member of the UN Association of Non-Government Organizations.
Nikolai Rerikh, who was also a poet, philosopher and explorer, was an extraordinary personality. Already an acclaimed painter, he spent a considerable part of his life studying oriental, predominantly Indian, lifestyle and culture. In 1925-1928 Rerikh he led art and research expeditions around the Tibet and Himalaii, Mongolia and China. He founded the Urusvati Institute Of Himalayan Studies in India. The Buddhist philosophy, Hindu and Tibetan mythology were as close to him as Scandinavian sagas and the Russian epos. Rerikh's "peace through culture" address to peoples of the world propagated the idea of a universal culture. In 1935 he drafted the so-called Rerikh Pact that formed the basis of the international convention for the protection of cultural values, which was signed in the Hague in 1935, already after his death. He died in 1947 at a small Indian village in the Kulu valley where he spent the last 10 years of his life. His vast heritage includes paintings, sets and costumes to the operas "Prince Igor" by Borodin and "Snow-Maid" by Rimsky-Korsakov and other theatre productions as well as dozens of volumes of essays and poetry. The unique exposition mounted at 9 well-equipped and cozy halls of the Rerikh Museum spans all major periods of Nikolai Rerikh's art and public career. The exhibits - archive documents, personal belongings, photos and paintings - are united by a single theme marking the quintessence of his philosophic teachings - the immortality of nature, humanity and art. His paintings dominated by blue, orange, red and indigo show all the magnificence of the snow-capped Himalayan peaks. Depicted at various times of the day and in all seasons, they come to symbolize man's eternal aspiration to spiritual heights.
The museum engages in versatile cultural and enlightenment activity: seminars, mobile exhibitions and publication of Rerikh's archives. A 3-volume edition of his "Diary Notes" and letters of his wife Yelena Rerikh, also in three volumes, both prepared by the Rerikh museum, have come out recently. The museum runs the so-called "optic shows". Special optical equipment creates the illusion of movement based on a continuous flow of light. Some of these thematic shows, accompanied by music, are devoted to Rerikh and his art, others to ancient cultures. There are special shows for children, among them "The Dolphin Land" and "Trailing The Little Prince" and others.
The museum hosts regular classical music concerts featuring world-famous stars and lesser-known performers. According to the music salon's organizer E. Cramp, the idea didn't come all at once. The Rerikhs were very fond of music. Nikolai Rerikh's wife Yelena, an excellent pianist, Russian composer Modest Musorgsky being a close relative of hers, implanted her love of music in her children. The family archives boast more than a hundred of gramophone records ranging from medieval chants to music by Stravisnky, Rakhmaninov, Prokofiev and Shostakovich.
 05.11.2001
 
 
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