"Europe Asia" Festival in Kazan - continued

<< Part 1

The third concert opened with several piano pieces performed by accomplished German pianist, Werner Barho, who played with great sensitivity and gravity, presenting each composition with a careful individual approach. Among the compositions he performed were Ukrainian composer Karmella Tsepkolenko's "Landscape Solo" a colorful, pictorial piece, featuring atonal harmonies and a sonoristical textural approach. Romanian composer Violeta Dinescu's "Torre di Si", written on an occasion of a birthday of a friend, where the note B (or "si") plays an important thematic role, likewise featuring a vibrant, contrasting textural approach to the piano with elements of tonal harmony within the context of an atonal sound world with a few distinct extended techniques including playing within the strings of the piano.

Belgian composer Petra Vermonte's "Erosion" for solo bass clarinet was an extravagant piece for a very unusually sounding instrument, featuring virtuosic passages and some outlandish sound effects, produced by a vast assortment of extended techniques. It was given a brilliant rendition by clarinetist Stephane Vermeersch.

Kazan composer Vitaly Kharisov's Sonata for guitar and piano, a traditionally styled piece with a solid, well-built form and contrasting expressive means was especially intriguing by its masterful usage of two such diverse and seemingly unmatchable instruments, which, due to the composer's ingenuity, blended together perfectly to produce a saturating timbral world and dramatic content, brought out through an adequate performance by the composer at the guitar with Maria Ziganshina at the piano.

Anil Deeksheet's exotic performance of traditional Indian folk music on the tabla, titled as "Talas II" provided a remarkable contrast and immersed the listener into a world of Indian music, sensed and conveyed by the performer genuine, inherent manner.

Korean composer Kim Jin Soo's "Space and Time", performed by Yuya Hayasi at the piano, brought the listener back into the twentieth and twenty first centuries by its accomplished innovative sound world, with a vibrant sense of contemporary harmonies and piano textures.

"Postlude VIII" for clarinet, piano and string quartet by accomplished composer from Azerbaijan Faradj Karayev, presently living in Moscow for the most part, one of a set of pieces with the same title for various instrumental ensembles, was a slow, intricately textured, introversive composition with a soft sound, refined timbral effects and a philosophical mood. It was given a superb performance by Kazan's Ensemble for New Music.

The same ensemble finished the concert by performing pieces by two Kazan composers, Farida Faizova's "Run along a Spiral", a vividly sounding, colorful piece and Anatoly Luppov's "Perpetuum Mobile", a dynamic, robust sounding piece with steady, regular rhythms, a fast pace and an exulted mood, quite fit for being a closing piece at a concert.

The last concert of the day featured electronic music from Moscow, set up by Moscow Conservatory's electronic studio, the Theremin Center and its director Andrei Smirnov and featuring pieces by mostly pupils of Moscow Conservatory, as well as other Moscow-based composers who work regularly at the Theremin Center, writing electronic pieces. The concert also featured a diverse amount of multi-media effects, including video installations, color projections and, in one case, choreography, done by a live dance group.

Vera Ivanova's "Panic. Melancholy" was a very pungent, harsh-sounding piece with plenty of grotesque sound effects, which helped the listener immerse into a variety of extreme emotional states, only two of which were indicated by the title.

Yuri Popovsky's sound-video installation "Stalingrad" was a very successful composition in its seemingly texturally primitive electronic effects, carried out in a static manner of sound blocks, which, nonetheless, presented a coherent, valid cubistic aesthetical statement. Its video effects presented images of distinct gloomy city landscapes in a cloudy, rainy weather with plenty of grandiose, grim-looking Soviet statues, shown at various perspectives, including sideways and upside down. However, the "Soviet reality" atmosphere of the city landscapes and the statues was, virtually, nonexistent, being skillfully subsumed into a cubistic, structuralistic and, at the same time, an atmospheric mood with a murky, melancholy mood, all of which provided for an artistically coherent multi-media composition.

Dmitri Subochev's "In the Stages of Movement" was a skillful composition with very skillful usage of intricately refined textures, reminiscent of the finest specimens of French electronic compositions, and a lyrical emotional quality, making up a highly accomplished piece of electronic music. The performance featured exotic visual effects, created by projections of various colors onto the stage.

The writer's composition "Precision" for violin and electronics, a four minute piece, combining serial technique and a textural approach to electronic sound, was given an extremely adequate performance by Tatar violinist Alsu Abdullina.

Andrei Smirnov's "Snochronotop", an "interactive performance" piece for sukuhati, special theremin-sensors, computer and the MAX/MSP featured composer and performer on Japanese instruments Dmitri Kalinin playing on the sukuhati what remotely sounded like Japanese music, the sound being processed by electronic equipment and merged to the pre-recorded electronic and computer effects of the programs, brought along by Smirnov from Moscow, creating an extravagant, richly sonorous sound world, successfully combining the spontaneous and the pre-determined to form a saturating artistic statement.

Andrei Dergachev's "BAN" with video effects by Olga Kumerger was a highly imaginative, musically elaborate composition with highlydescriptive graphic effects of the video, adding to the zest of the concert.

This concert, presenting mostly Moscow-based composers, included one Kazan composer Radik Salimov, who presented his piece "Immatra" for percussion, computer and dance, featuring percussionist Mikhail Krasnichkin and Kazan-based chamber ballet "Panthera", directed by Nailya Ibragimova. It was a very dynamic texturally elaborate piece, featuring plenty of dramatic effects, created by the successful merging of the various percussion instruments with the varied computer effects, ranging from the delicate to the grotesque. The dance ensemble presented modern choreography with abstract, geometric movements by the dancer, which successfully complemented the highly saturating music.

The concert closed off with a non-electronic piece, namely Dmitri Kalinin's "Sound of the Bell at Night" for sakuhati, koto and percussion, with Georgy Mnatsakanov playing the sakuhati and Dmitri Kalinin playing the koto and the syamisen. It was a wildly extravagant piece, full of odd textural effects, having only very slight traces of Japanese music, but mostly stemming from an improvisatory, strongly impulsive instrumental upsurge, having as one of its elements influences from the psychedelic culture. Whereas many of the sound effects were very interesting, its chief fault, similarly to Kalinin's other music-making happenings, was that it was too long, having essentially said what it had to at about the first third of its length. Nevertheless, despite this one failing, its extravagant qualities added to the festival's effect of pageantry and brought the long day of four concerts to a successful conclusion.

The final Gala concert, which took place at the Big Concert Hall the final day of the festival, lasted for four hours, and featured most of the musicians from Kazan and other cities and countries coming out on stage, their numbers being announced on the spot as surprises and not, for the most part, printed in the program. Especially impressive was the Swiss "Orion" ensemble, consisting ofcomposer Jean-Luc Darbellay, violinists Noelle Darbellay and Francisco Rafael Sierra and basset horn player Elisabeth Darbellay playing Darbellay's music, Agnethe Christensen's tasteful epic performances of Danish and Swedish folk music, Anil Deeksheet's masterful rendition of Indian traditional folk music on the tabla, Stephane Vermeersch's virtuosic performance of Berio's Sequenza for clarinet, Werner Barho's impressive performance of GHustavo Bessera-Schmidt's piano music, Asami Hatori's singing of Yamada's art songs with Maki Sekia at the piano and vibrant performances by Kazan's Ensemble for New Music of intriguing chamber pieces by Kazan composers Rezeda Akhiyarova, Leonid Lubovsky and Shamil Timerbulatov.

One of the highlights of the gala concert was a performance of a theatrical composition by Moscow composer Alexander Bakshi "From the Red Book", subtitled "A Game of Imagination for a Pianist and Six Characters" featuring the celebrated Moscow composer Alexei Lubimov, along with other soloists: Elena Sergeyeva, Irina Evdokimova, Sergei Zhirkov, Yaroslav Sudzilovsky, Ilya Appelbaum and Anatoly Arkhipov with stage and video effects by Ilya Appelbaum, all under the direction of Ludmila Bakshi. The work featured Lubimov sitting at the piano in the middle of the stage, playing, stopping, talking and walking at various intervals, whereas the other soloists were situated at various positions of the stage, often on different rising grounds, likewise playing, carrying out theatrical gestures and movements and stopping at prescribed times. On the stage there were several screens situated, featuring various video effects at alternate times. The musical lines, spoken phrases and carried out gestures of each of the instrumentalists and the individual video fragments recounted in a fragmented, abstract, modernist manner a story about an event or situation in the life of an individual, the main hero of this narrative being the pianist, since he was situated in the center of the stage, and the title indicated that he was the main character. Altogether, this theatrical piece was an impressive feature of the gala concert, and highlighted the theatrical element, inherent in many of the contemporary compositions, presented at the concert, and bringing this year's Europe-Asia to a successful conclusion.

The festival left many of the participants and audience members extremely pleased and impressed with the broad range of styles and trends of folk, classical and contemporary music presented at the festival, and with the high quality of the music and of its performance.