By Anton Rovner
The Fifth International Contemporary Music Festival “Europe-Asia,” which took place between March 29 and March 31, 2002, in Kazan, the capital of the Republic of Tatarstan in Russia, turned out to be a very noteworthy event. Established in 1992 by Tatar composer, Rashid Kalimoullin, the head of the Composers’ Union of the Republic of Tatarstan, the festival has been organized every two years in Kazan with additional concerts held in smaller cities of Tatarstan, such as Almetyevsk, Nizhnekamsk, Zelenodolsk and Yelabuga. The conception of the festival was to bring together contemporary musicians from Europe and Asia, as well as the United States. Tatarstan’s geographical location, being a crossroad between Europe and Asia, proved to be very advantageous for carrying out the plan of the festival. The festival turned out to be an invaluable venue for bringing together musicians from a many countries, as well as for demonstrating the unique culture of the Tatars, a people situated on the Volga with a rich historical heritage and tradition.
Lasting only for three days, the festival presented such a saturating program, that it seemed to many to last for a much longer period of time. Its highly diverse programming presented different styles and genres of music, from straightforwardly “classic” academic music to music with a slant towards folk and popular styles, from traditional to avant-garde styles, being an adequate venue for both its own Tatar composers as well as composers from other parts of Russia as well as guests from abroad.
An important element of the festival was presenting music with distinctly Tatar exoticism, for the most part derived from Tatar folk music traditions as well as inspired by Tatar folk tales, epic stories or the Muslim religious tradition. This was clearly manifested in the very first musical piece performed at the opening concert, which was a Tatar traditional choral piece, which, being quite simple in its construction, contained exotic melodic ornamentation. The Folk Music Ensemble of the Tatar State Philharmonic Society, directed by Marat Yahyayev sang it.
An excellent example of the way contemporary composers treated folk material was Almaz Monasypov’s “Legends of Ancient Bulgar”, a large-scale work in five movements for folk music ensemble, performed by the aforementioned ensemble. Dressed in exotic Tatar folk costumes, carrying the folk instruments, the musicians came out on stage and started playing. A solo melody started out, played on a pipe, accompanied by the folk instrument the “gusli” as well as by the violin. Then the singers’ lines came in successively, one by one, presenting folk-style music. The music was accompanied by slow and steady choreographed dancing. The national exoticism was a good attraction for the festival guests. The piece had strong epic qualities, suggesting a recounting of a story, though some of the music contained some popular cliches, suggesting 1950’s American musicals, in the vein of Richard Rodgers.
Tatar composer from the city Yelabuga, Zubarzhat Sadykova’s chamber piece “The Tree of Life” for flute, trumpet, double-bass and piano, performed by Vladislav Zakharov flute, Denis Lonshakov trumpet, Marat Volkov double bass, Julia Blinova piano, followed along these lines. It was essentially a Romantic, tonal piece in minor mode, which was based on Tatar folk elements. Each instrumental part had its own face and character and demonstrated its respective unique, instrumental capacities, emphasizing some unusual effects and extended techniques, the piano part being the most “standard” with essentially romantic textures.
A different type of piece was “The Treasures of the Golden Horde” for percussion ensemble, by the esteemed older-generation composer, Anatoly Luppov, performed by members of the Kazan Conservatory, directed by Idris Sabiryanov. Though not containing any reference to folk music material, the piece depicted an episode of early Tatar history in a theatrical, depictive way, with an imaginative palette of timbres and theatrical effects. Starting with slow, sparse intricate textures or a rather avant-garde type, the piece gradually expanded to a loud, robust, dynamic sound world, suggesting a stampede of wild horses, depicting very well the wild forces of the Golden Horde. The piece produced a wild outburst of enthusiasm from the audience, which applauded energetically for a long time.
Another work utilizing Tatar folk traditions in conjunction with ballet, was Shamil Timerbulatov, “Suyumbike’s Dream” for string orchestra and dance, performed by “La Primavera” string orchestra of the Kazan Conservatory, conducted by Roustem Abiazov and the chamber ballet “Panther” directed by Nail Ibragimov. The music was traditional ballet music, rather neo-classical in its harmonic language, episodic in its form, with contrasting dynamic content, rather traditional textures, at times joined with more modern sounding harmonies and a limited amount of extended techniques, for instance the violins playing on the other side of the bridge. The ballet, the plot of which was based on a Tatar epic folk tale, featured men dressed in black dancing with girls dressed in blue, the dance likewise alternating between slow, steady and fast and violent.
The festival presented curious mixtures of folk music traditions of different peoples, not only Tatars. An example of such fusion was the duet of two musicians of different nationalities, singing improvisations, each derived from their own traditions, which successfully blended together. Folk musician from Tuva, Alexander Chavynchak sang improvisations following the famous Tuvan vocal extended technique tradition from Buryatia, one of the indigenous nationalities of Siberia, singing several notes simultaneously as overtones, accompanying himself on the guitar. He was joined with Moscow singer Liza Ivanova, singing an improvisation in a fusion of Russian folk tradition with more contemporary pop music traditions. She sang to the famous text of “Yaroslavna’s Lament” from the famous 12th century epic poem “the Saga of Prince Igor’s Regiment”. This combined improvisation turned out to be a very successful experiment of joining musical traditions of different lands. Chavynchak and Ivanova also performed together at the final Gala concert of March 31, singing a joined “Improvisation” likewise, combining the two respective folk traditions together.
Ilfat Davletshin’s piece “There is no Cure for Death” for tenor voice, violin and piano, set on a Tatar folk text was another example of combination of Tatar folk music element with popular music elements. The violin and piano were used in a rather generic, academic manner, while the tenor part provided for much more imaginative music, successfully carrying on the tradition of Tatar Muslim religious chanting.
Shamil Sharifoullin’s “Mishar Diptych”, performed by Larisa Maslova on the cello with Guzel Abulkhanova piano was a rather academic, neo-classical piece with straightforward tonal harmonies with strong intonations of Tatar folk music. It was an extensive piece in several contrasting textures with a strong dramaturgical contour and a limited amount of extended techniques, like playing col legno on the cello.
A striking example of such exoticism was a cantata by Tatar composer, Masguda Shamsutdinova, the Fragment of Mystery “The Birth of the Prophet” for chamber chorus and percussion, which was performed by the “Hiyal” Youth Chamber Choir, directed by A.Zaparov, with Idris Sabiryanov and R.Gilmanov playing the percussion parts. It presented a setting of the 97th Surah of the Koran, which deals with the birth of Mohammed. Written in a rather traditional style, the work combined a vibrant theatrical element with lavish textural work, an organic incorporation of Tatar folk and Muslim religious musical tradition. Solo vocal lines alternated with choral sections, all of which were accompanied by imaginative percussion instrumentation with a wide assortment of timbral effects. One part of the composition even involved a fragment of a Tatar religious incantation. Here the conglomeration of the theatric, the folk and the religious musical elements was the most successful and was warmly received by the audience.
A large number of Kazan composers were less interested in exploring Tatar folk traditions, being content with following established Western trends, alternately traditional and avant-garde ones. Rezeda Akhiarova’s “A Survivor for New York” for violin, cello, clarinet and piano, performed by violinist Asya Meshberg, clarinetist, Philip Bashor, cellist Lucia Izmagilova and pianist Munira Khabibulina, described the emotional impact on a witness of the September 11 World Trade Center bombing in New York. It was a somber, tragic piece of a moderately traditional style, along the lines of Bartok, with a dramatic succession of slow and fast sections. Though rather predictable in its musical style, the piece produced a good impression with its serious emotional qualities and its well-built form.
Renat Hakimov’s “Allegro” for flute, oboe, clarinet, xylophone and piano, performed by flutist Vladislav Zakharov, oboist Alisa Slashkina, clarinetist Eduard Musin, Idris Sabiryanov on the xylophone and pianist Julia Blinova had a totally different mood, being fast, lively and brisk, having a “patchwork” combination of continuous rhythmic continuity and interfering dramatic pauses, producing a fragmentation of textures, as if the listeners only got to hear a glimpse of the continuing rhythmic development. The heterogeneity of the instruments and their failure to blend together gave the piece an additional textural zest. There was a dramatic sequential repetition of phrases with rhythmic alteration of their lengths in repetition. Several Kazan composers presented large-scale symphonic compositions, performed by Kazan Conservatory’s “La Primavera” string orchestra, conducted by Roustem Abiazov, sometimes joined by other instrumentalists. Svetlana Zoryukova, a graduate of the Kazan Conservatory and the Moscow Conservatory, had her “Pantheistic Prelude” for clarinet, piano and string orchestra performed by La Primavera in conjunction with two guest artists from France: clarinetist Christian Rocca and Russian-born pianist Youri Pochtar. It was a large-scale, dramatic work, written in a traditional style with a chromatic yet tonal-centered harmonic language with contrasting fast and slow sections. It began with a slow, mysterious, soft but dramatic section, where the clarinet played virtuosic solo passages while the strings held long, dramatic chords. This was followed by a fast, dramatic section, with robust, neo-classical textures and bouncy, punctured rhythms in the strings and the piano, over which the clarinet played fast, virtuosic passages, producing interesting polyphonic relation between the three entities – the clarinet, the piano and the strings. A final, slow section followed it, and the piece ended the way it began.
Another Kazan composer, Vitaly Kharisov, presented his Concerto for Flute, Guitar and String Orchestra with La Primavera chamber orchestra, himself playing the solo part on the guitar and Venera Porfiryeva playing the flute. It was an extensive three-movement piece of traditional style and contrasting dramatic moods and textures. There was an interesting alternation of functions of the two soloists, who sometimes played separately, while at other times joined in a duet, the competition for prominence between the two of them providing for an important dramatic element of the piece. The first movement featured loud, bouncy rhythms and robust moods, as well as softer, lyrical moods, with some jazz and Tatar folk music effects. The second movement was slow with distinctive pop musical effects. The third movement was fast, bouncy and dynamic, with a marked rhythmic contour, involving syncopations.
The most successful composition of the younger-generation Kazan composers was Sergei Belikov’s “Chamber Symphony” for string orchestra, performed by the La Primavera string orchestra. A moderately traditional piece, it successfully combined traditional and avant-garde stylistic features. The piece had an alteration of fast and slow sections, had an abundance of atonal harmonic clusters, which it frequently combined with regular rhythmic patterns, and reminded to a degree of early Lutoslawski’s music.
In the chamber concert, flutist Venera Porfiryeva performed in a masterful manner a work by younger generation Kazan composer, Vadim Petrov, his “Scherzo” for flute. It was an innovative, avant-garde piece, featuring quick, light, virtuosic passages alternate with slow, meditative passages in a lyrical vein.
A rather intriguing work by prominent middle-generation Kazan composer Lorenz Blinov, “Nota Vita” for solo trumpet was performed in a masterful manner by Denis Lonshakov. It started offstage with dramatic appellations, then continued with the soloist coming into the hall. The piece featured moderately chromatic harmonies and, despite the presence of a military musical element, was not very spirited in mood. It was rather neo-classical with a limited amount of modernist elements, and contained clearly recognizable phrases, dispersed with regularly placed pauses. At the end of the piece the soloist put on his mute and walked offstage, finishing the piece backstage.
Pianist Alina Taranova performed the second and third movements of the Sonata-Dedication to Henrietta Mirville for piano by the famous Russian composer of Tatar descent, a naive of Kazan, Sophia Gubaidulina. It was a moderately innovative, even somewhat generic piece; the slow movement involved a ritual solemnity and some extended techniques like playing in the strings, while the finale had busy motor rhythms and a dynamic energy, the style bordering on neo-classical.
Among the guest artists of the festival, there was a number of excellent ensembles from Europe. One of those was the Luxembourg Saxophone Quartet, featuring its director Guy Goethals, Nadina Kauffmann, Marco Pütz and Roland Schneider. They performed several pieces by different composers in the various concerts. On the opening concert they played British composer Howard Jacob’s Saxophone Quartet N.2, a lightweight, neo-classical piece with Bartokian harmonies, which had an abundance of superficial light-music textural effects, and had an overall feeling of a superficial concert-opener, though performed with great merit. The following day they played “Melisma” by prominent Luxembourgish composer, Claude Lenners, a very sophisticated composition of a European avant-garde style and excellent technique and emotional qualities and a convincing dramaturgical content. It started with a slow and delicate beginning, gradually developing an intricate polyphony between the instruments. There was a pulsating alternation between static and dynamic music. Both the composition and its performance were of the highest quality.
Klaus Kremliowski’s Quartet was a light, popular-sounding piece in four movements, and an obvious crowd pleaser, good for finishing off a concert. The first movement’s development and the entire second movement had more serious, somber moods and slightly more chromatic harmonies, while the third and fourth movements returned to the light-weight moods and contained some jazzy effects. The performers’ rendition of the piece was excellent. Rashid Kalimoullin’s “Train Ride: Frankfurt-Luxembourg” for four saxophones, was written as an incidental piece during his train ride between the two mentioned cities. It was a rather lightweight piece, which featured bouncy, neo-classical rhythms, resembling the train sound. Quasi-Romantic textures and tonal harmonies with parallel progressions followed these. The performers played the composition with great skill and dexterity, doing full justice to it.
There was a group of musicians from France, constituting the CRWTH ensemble – the name derived from a Celtic word denoting an archaic Irish musical instrument. Young French composer, Francois Sarhan, led it. The other members of the ensemble were guitarist Florian Conil, violinist Marie-Laure Sarhan, horn player Erwan Burban and tenor voice Jean-Francois Chiama. Though the ensemble had previously performed an assortment of repertoire, including folk, classical, contemporary music and improvisations, during the festival they performed exclusively the music of Francois Sarhan. All of Sarhan’s pieces were endowed with a dadaistic, absurdistic quality, extremely deconstructivistic in its aesthetic and a pungently ironic and sardonic in mood. On the opening concert they performed “Pirouette, cacahuete” for the ensemble and electronics, a frivolous piece, consisting of recording of a baby making talking noises in the electronics, while the instrumental parts presented disjunct effects, most notably waltz music effects, performed with the aim of parody and mockery.
The following day, Sarhan’s piece for ensemble and electronics, called “Hell, a Small Detail” was performed. It consisted of disjunct, sporadic lines for the musicians, with no unity of materials between the parts whatsoever. Each musician played a totally different type of music, both tonal and atonal musical fragments. As was announced prior to the performance, this is the way that the composer imagined hell for musicians. The piece included some lengthy mechanical repetitions of sequential patterns, as well as extended techniques such as guitar hitting the wooden parts as well as grotesque effects for horn. Its overall intent was, clearly, to send shivers down the spine of the audience.
At the final concert, Sarhan’s piece “Lesson” was performed, this time involving the tenor, Jean-Francois Chiama, set to the text of Russian underground avant-garde poet of the 1930’s, Daniil Kharms. The subject of the text was a certain man, presenting a lecture to the public on women, about which he does not understand anything. There was more grotesque, ironic music with disjunct sounds, sometimes even including chordal chorales, the latter not in the least alleviating the disjunct quality of the music. The tenor sang sprechstimme, at times almost reciting, at times producing the additional humorous effect of shaking his head up and down at the same time as the horn played octaves up and down. Another effect was when the guitar is plucked loudly while the tenor laughed and gesticulated with his hands. The music frequently parodied familiar tonal gestures. All of these qualities gave the music a menacing, mephistophelean quality.
The festival had a number of highly qualified musicians from Sweden. Percussionist Olaf Olsson gave a superb performance of Italian composer Franco Donatoni’s “Omar” for solo vibraphone. It was an intricate piece with an almost Impressionistic mood, with arpeggiated passages separated by rests with held pedals, carrying over the previous harmonies. Steady rhythmical elements were present, yet the textural element reigned supreme. The piece and its performance were of excellent quality. In the final Gala concert, Olsson performed Iannis Xenakis’ “Repons B” for several percussion instruments, playing with a vibrant virtuosity. It was a dynamic, aggressively sounding piece with energetic rhythmic patterns and plenty of sequential repetitions in the same instruments.
The “Vox” vocal quartet from Sweden featured soprano Ulrika Ahlen Axberg, tenor Tore Sunesson, baritone Matts Johansson and Danish mezzo-soprano Agnethe Christensen. They sang an intriguing and imaginative repertoire for vocal quartet. Rashid Kalimoullin’s piece “From the Windsor Forest,” set to a poem by 18th century British poet, Alexander Pope, was a simple, plain and emotionally sincere composition, entirely tonal in harmony and Romantic and lyrical in mood. The music conveyed adequately the mood of the poem, the text of which was very thoroughly pronounced by the singers. The following day, on the first concert, they performed several pieces by two Swedish composers. “Your Mouth was a Poppy” by Christian Bredin for cello and vocal ensemble, in which the Vox ensemble was joined by Tatar cellist Zulfia Asadulina, was a very noteworthy piece, containing strong expressive qualities and imaginative textural effects. It started with short, effective notes on the cello solo with the vocalists singing minor diatonic clusters, followed by separate, sporadically sounding notes, at times striking bells, which they held in their hands. The piece had a plaintive and austere mood and a somewhat religious flavor. It gained some additional momentum in its development, but kept the fragmented character throughout, despite the dynamic acceleration in its middle section. The singers produce interesting textural effects with the bells, which they themselves struck. There was a very limited amount of extended techniques, including the sopranos whistling, the cellist singing into the bell while playing short notes and the men singing countertenor falsetto in one place.
The two vocal pieces by Sven-Eric Johannson “Every Little Drop of Dew” set to the poem of A. Frostenson and “There is Something Beyond the Mountains” set to the poem by D.Andersson presented themselves as more regular, continuous pieces, very short in duration, with diatonic, neo-classical harmonies with mild dissonances, overall rhythmic regularity and an overall folk-song quality. Danish mezzo-soprano Agnethe Christenssen sang solo, performing John Cage’s “Eight Wiskus” set to a text by James Joyce. The piece was dadaistic rather than avant-gardistic in its aesthetics, and had a primitivist approach. It presented a tonal melody with an audibly recognizable text, though not having regular traditional melodic qualities, due to the “prose” setting. The singer sang consciously in a brusque voice, and the tonal melody presented disjunct, formless figuration and contained many major ninth leaps, perfectly fit for the piece’s dadaist quality.
In the final, Gala concert, the Vox ensemble finished off the concert by singing Francois Sarhan “That’s Life”, a piece endowed with mocking, parody elements, with a dynamic, rhythmical quality and the familiar devil’s advocate attitude. The title of the work implied that the composer was consciously mocking the audience’s sensibilities, subjecting them to a heavy dosage of his acrid irony. The singers finished off the concert with an encore, singing established Swedish composer Arne Mellnaes’ “The Kiss”, a serious, sonorously sounding piece, which helped dispel the mockery of the previous piece and brought the festival to a harmonious conclusion.
Among the Japanese participants, the most noteworthy was Japanese recorder soloist, living in Holland, Toshio Suzuki. In addition to presenting a master-class, where he demonstrated contemporary techniques for the recorder, he performed several pieces, demonstrating a very innovative, experimental technique. At the opening concert, he performed Italian composer Luca Cori's "Ladder", a piece for two recorders, involving vibrant innovative techniques as well as lyrical textures. He played the piece on two recorders simultaneously in a brilliantly virtuosic manner, even involving some polyphonic interplay between the two instruments.
Next day, on the second concert, he performed Luciano Berio's "Gesti", a piece in three movements without a break. The interesting form of the piece was that in the first movement, the movements of the fingers and the mouth did not correspond at all, in the second movement they corresponded partially, and in the third movement they corresponded fully. It had the most outlandish extended techniques and effects, the most crucial one of which was that the piece was so soft, that the performer played into a microphone and the ventilation was turned off.
The final day he performed Salvatore Sciarrino's "Come vengono prodotti gli incantesimi", a piece written for flute, but arranged by Suzuki for recorder. It was a very eccentric piece, which started with very soft tongue-clicking sounds, repeated many times with microscopic alterations of rhythm and timbre, something, which could well resemble insect music, by its overly intricate effects. A few sporadic loud overblowing sounds played staccato dispelled the monotony. Later the music became somewhat louder, but the staccato pattern remained, involving unstandard type of breathing and extended techniques, as well as tremolo, glissandi. The piece was interesting in its concept, though excessively experimental and insect-like in its sound, maybe due to the player's eccentric manner of playing.
In the Gala concert Suzuki performed Brian Ferneyhough's "Carceri d'Invenzione II," a complex piece, involving fast, scurrying passages, to be played at a soft dynamic with great virtuosity, but consisting also of undertone types of sound, with an assortment of extended techniques. By this time, the soloist's manner of performance and the type of his repertoire has become so predictable, that yet another piece, containing microscopic sound effects, mostly featuring extended techniques, performed in the same vein, evoked laughter from a number of the audience members.
The second major Japanese participant was older generation composer Mitsuru Asaka, whose composition "Nebuta Ballad" was performed by Tatar violinist Shamil Monasypov and Japanese pianist Sayaka Uyeda. It was a straight-ahead tonal, Romantic composition with a slant towards Chinese and Japanese pentatonicism in the harmonies. The piece was rather academic in its style and had an outright popular, mass-appealing character, though complemented with a pretentious and affectatious manner.
In the first concert of the second day, Japanese composer Samure Nukina's piano piece "Blues for Tera" was performed by Japanese pianist Yuya Hayashi. It was a soft, lyrical piano piece with a very beautiful and texturally delicate introduction, though its later development ended up being somewhat sagging and less impressive than its beginning.
Among the guests from the other former Soviet republics was the "Harmonia Mundi" string quartet from Odessa, Ukraine, consisting of violinists Natalia Litvinova and Leonid Piskun, violist Iya Komarova and cellist Sergei Scholz. The string quartet was part of a larger ensemble, likewise called "Harmonia Mundi", and directed by Scholz. They performed a number of impressive pieces by composers from around the world. They performed "Ordinary Time" for string quartet by American composer David MacMullin, a very moving piece, quite innovative in its stylistic manner and textural usage, while having an distinct emotional quality. It contrasted fast, scurrying sections with slow static ones, and juxtaposed its predominantly atonal harmonies with a few tonal reminiscences in several short sections.
Two members of the quartet, Litvinova and Scholz performed "Duel-Duo" for violin and cello by prominent composer from Odessa, Karmella Tsepkolenko. It was a substantial piece, modernist in its stylistic outlook and endowed with a Romantic, emotional mood and gestures. Fast, dramatic sections with quavering textures full of trills and tremolos alternated with slow, static sections with long held notes.
"From the Bottom of the Soul" for string quartet by Julia Gomelskaya, another important Odessa composer, was a serious, expressive piece with an elaborate formal development, an overall Romantic mood and an assortment of intricate effects and soft, slow delicate textures and a few extended techniques, with remote hints of tonality seeping through a predominantly atonal harmonic world.
"Harmonia Mundi" also performed Lithuanian composer Vytautas Germanavicius' "Expressija" for string quartet, a highly expressive piece with static tonal harmonies, combined with a rather avant-garde approach to texture, containing a lot of intricate textural effects as well as an overall dramatic mood
Among the guests from the United States were Tatar Asya Murtazina-Meshberg, currently living in Connecticut, a member of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and clarinetist Philip Bashor. In addition to performing "A Survivor from New York" by Akhiarova, Meshberg performed a few solo pieces by New York based composers. One of them was "Prelude and Dance" by Romanian-born Dinu Ghezzu, currently the head of the composition department of the New York University School of Education, written especially for Meshberg. It was a short, substantial piece with discursive qualities which said all that it had to say in a short period of time, combining a vibrant expressivity with a quizzical, formless quality, reminiscent of Satie's aesthetic.
In the final concert, Asya Meshberg and Philip Bashor performed a piece for violin and clarinet, titled as "Between" by another New York University faculty member, Jerica Oblak. It had a plaintive, lamenting mood and a predominantly minor mode, and featured a lot of repetitions of several groups of notes in a sonorical fashion, as well as other types of textural elaborations.
Another continent, which the audience, attending the festival were able to visit, while attending the concerts, was Africa - represented by a piece by South African composer Michael Blake, whose piece "Honey Gathering Song" for flute and string quartet was performed by flutist Vladislav Zakharov and the Tatarstan State String Quartet. A rather traditional piece with repetitive rhythms and repetitive tonal harmonies, bordering on minimalist technique, its melodic content was to a certain degree based on folk-music, presumably from South Africa. It combined a moderately fast tempo and rhythmically busy dynamicism with a soft, subtle textural world and even a somewhat lyrical mood, with elements of dance textures, the latter becoming more prominent in the somewhat livelier middle section.
There were two highly qualified European composers attending the festival, present at the performances of their works. Swiss composer from Bern, Jean-Luc Darbellay had two of his compositions performed by soloists from the Moscow Ensemble for Contemporary Music. Pianist Mikhail Dubov gave a spirited performance of Darbellay's "Messages" for piano, a set of very short pieces, each lasting about half a page and dedicated to different musicians. They were delicately textured and were endowed with expressive qualities, as well as atonal harmonies. Each piece emphasized a particular pianistic texture, some of which were simple enough to be given to children for pedagogical usage, while others were technically much more advanced. At the same time, they successfully combined into one complete entity, so that the composition sounded like one, continuous piece.
Darbellay's "Flash" for bass-clarinet, was performed by clarinetist Oleg Tantsov. A very short piece, lasting one and a half minutes in duration, it had a very concise form and pungent dramatic flow. It featured grotesque textures and moods, as manifested by the initial motive played by means of slaps in low register, recurring several times in the piece as a leitmotif. Moderately lyrical atonal melodic lines successfully alternated with loud, harsh, dramatic eruptions as well as subdued tremolos between two notes, played pianissimo. The performance by Tantsov was of greatest merit and did full justice to the piece.
Roderick der Mann from Holland, who was present at the performance of two of his compositions and also gave a presentation of his music at the Composers' Union Building. "Keyboard Space" for piano, played by Mikhail Dubov, was a complex, avant-garde piece of a post-Boulez type with very a cerebral approach, though somewhat eclectic in that it contained diverse musical material, not meant to be unified stylistically, and a few striking theatrical gestures. The most prominent of them was beginning the piece with striking the keyboard with a long wooden slate, producing a cluster, and ending the piece with the wooden slate and a few soft notes played on the strings inside the keyboard.
Der Mann's "Gramvousa" for flute, bass-clarinet, piano and electronics was performed by all three of the soloists of the Moscow Ensemble for Contemporary Music - flutist, Ilya Lundin, clarinetist Oleg Tantsov, pianist Mikhail Dubov, and conducted by Jean-Luc Darbellay. The work's title was the name of the place where the god of the wind was born in Homer's Odyssey. An extravagant piece, it followed the European avant-garde trend and was somewhat extended in length, however endowed with rich, sonorous textures and a lyrical, expressive mood. The wind instruments' parts were quite imaginatively innovative, whereas the piano part at times slanted towards familiar Romantic textures including octave doublings, which worked well in this context, despite the seeming discrepancy.
Many other European composers, not present at the festival, were well represented by outstanding performances of their works. Dutch composer Jacob ter Veldhuis's Sonata "Rivygio de Uccelli notturni" for cello and piano was performed by Tatar cellist Zulfia Asadulina and Dutch pianist Kees Wieringa. It was a serious, substantial one-movement piece with tonal harmonies and rather traditional, neo-classical style and textures. It started out with a slow introduction, with the cello playing solo in a subdued yet dramatic manner, and the piano coming in later, playing tonal-centered chords in an austere, reservedly dramatic manner. The following fast section featured busy romantic textures and minimalistically repetitive tonal harmonies, though the development was not minimalistic. Despite the somewhat generic musical material, the piece was very expressive, well-structured and, generally speaking, of excellent quality, matched with an equally superb performance. Kees Wieringa performed Alvin Curran's piece "For Cornelius" in memory of composer Cornelius Cardew, a tonal, romantically textured piece in two movements. The first movement was more conventionally romantic, with relatively static harmonies. In the second movement there was an even greater predominance of minimalistic repetition in the harmonies and textures. The performance was very thoughtful and delicately expressive.
Flutist from Moscow, Ilya Lundin gave an excellent performance of Dutch composer Gus Janssen's "Bach Rock after G.F. Telemann", a more conventional type of piece. Entirely diatonic in its harmonic and melodic language, it presented rather straight-ahead variations on Telemann's piece with very minimal deviation from the later into more neutralized neo-classical harmonies, though never really overcoming the variation scheme and Telemann's exact harmonic progressions. French clarinetist Christian Rocca gave an excellent rendition of Pierre Boulez's solo clarinet piece, "Domaines Cahiers," emphasizing the piece's intellectual, cerebral and subtly expressive qualities. Rocca successfully highlighted the fragmented quality of the piece, which involves limited aleatory technique, in that the individual fragments and sections can be played in different orders. He delineated the pauses between the fragments as well as the semi-autonomous nature of each on of them, giving careful attention to their phrasing.
A number of compositions were wonderfully performed by an outstanding Tatar pianist, Renat Shakirov, living in St. Petersburg. His performance of Three Preludes by Maurice Ohana from the composer's 24 Preludes for piano was superb. They presented themselves as very elaborately textured modernistic pieces, the first two being rather simplistic, with basic pianistic chordal effects, while the third prelude gaining momentum with more effective piano textures, including quite dramatic clusters.
Shakirov opened the Gala concert with Ligeti's "Open Fifths" Prelude, dedicated to Pierre Boulez. His rendition did full justice to the post-modern, romantic textures of the piece and the very subtle cerebral elements inherent in the demonstration of the on-going cycle of perfect fifths.
A very impressive performance was given by Shakirov of a piece by a Russian composer, namely "Brave New World" by prominent St. Petersburg composer Alexander Radvilovich, who was present at the festival. The piece was based on Aldous Huxley's novel and its formal structure corresponds to the development the novel, consisting of three discernable sections. The piece had strong depictive, narrative element with contrasting textures and a dynamic, dramaturgical contour, though the chordal textural element predominates. The beginning demonstrated a dynamic mood with regular, almost neo-classical rhythmic patterns, but with avant-garde sonoristical textural approach. The following episode was more subdued with sparse, dry, separate chords, after which came another dynamic piece with continuous chords and a somewhat extroversive mood.
The other noteworthy composer from St. Petersburg present at the festival was Sergei Oskolkov, who also presented himself as a outstanding performer. Together with the esteemed violinist, Roustem Abiazov, he performed his "Four Pieces Quasi una Sonata", a serious, well thought-out piece. It combined together the very contrasting genres of a four-movement sonata and four individual miniatures, since each of the four movements of the piece were very contrasting in style and textures, and yet they had a striking overall unity behind them. The work opened with a neo-classical sound world with brusque, busy, regularly patterned rhythms. This was followed by a romantic movement with tonal harmonies and lyrical textures. Then came sparse, atonal textures for both instruments, with many pizzicati in the violin and separate notes and clusters in the piano. The final movement returned to the busy, rhythmical manner of the first movement, with a large amount of repetitions and sequences of musical phrases. The musicians gave the piece an excellent performance.
At another concert, Oskolkov performed his Fifth Piano Sonata, a large-scale dramatic one-movement work. A slow, soft beginning with pungent notes in the bass register gradually accelerated to a fast, dynamic section with modernist harmonies and regular, neo-classical rhythms. Loud motor-rhythmed dynamic sections alternated with soft sections with sparse pointillistic effects, almost serially sounding, and with gentle, impressionistic textures. The piece ended with a simple sounding tonal melody played in the high register, sounding almost like a song for children.
The Europe-Asia festival had once again proved the great merit and its enormous success of its initial conception by bringing together a wide variety of interesting musicians from different countries and continents, and by enabling the dwellers of Kazan as well as visitors from other cities and countries to immerse themselves into a wide variety of different styles and trends of contemporary music, which were organically combined together and found great resonance in the concert halls of Kazan. Let us hope that the Europe-Asia festival will continue to thrive in the future years.