2023-06-15 22:07:30
The report that Rust Pozyumsky, a well-known St. Petersburg performer on the viola da gamba and other ancient string instruments, wrote a requiem strictly following the structure of the canonical funeral mass, at first glance may seem quite ordinary. For the baroque specialist who stubbornly continues to string gut strings instead of the much more practical steel strings on his instruments, the classical requiem is just another manifestation of “playing with authenticity”.
But on June 20, in the Moscow concert hall “DK” Rassvet “the game, admittedly, will be quite large-scale. The 45-minute composition in 11 parts was written for four soloists – soprano, alto, tenor and bass, choir (the Questa musica vocal ensemble performs in this capacity), obligate zinc (an old woodwind instrument), viol consort, basso continuo (viola, violon and harpsichord) and percussion. Complete baroque!
However, in the XIX-XXI centuries, many “secular” requiems were written, including a 1985 composition by Andrew Lloyd Webber with clear elements of rock opera. Pozyumsky himself, in a conversation with Vedomosti, admitted that his requiem is also not without such elements. And this is not at all surprising if you know the background of its appearance. 47-year-old Rust Pozyumsky graduated from the St. Petersburg Conservatory as a violist, studying optionally at the Department of Special Composition and Improvisation with Professor Gennady Banshchikov. Pozyumsky studied the intricacies of performing baroque music under the guidance of one of the founders of the authentic performance of early music, the Dutchwoman Maria Leonhardt, who in the 1990s. specially came to St. Petersburg to pass on her secrets to young St. Petersburg musicians. Another of his teachers is the violinist Andrey Reshetin, who is respected by his colleagues as an artistic director and first violinist of the first baroque orchestra in Russia – the Orchestra of Catherine the Great. But much more widely Reshetin is known as the violinist of the “Aquarium” for five difficult years of perestroika.
And from Reshetin, apparently, a bridge is being thrown to Pozyumsky’s own rock projects, to which he paid a generous tribute, starting in 1998. At the same time, he did not forget about numerous baroque projects. So, in 2016, as part of the Barocco Concertato ensemble, he became a laureate of the International Van Wassenaer Competition in Utrecht (Netherlands). A new stage, which brought interest in ancient and authentic music to a new level, began in 2017, when Pozyumsky, together with the owner of the crystal soprano, a graduate of the Mark Blok Institute of the RSUH (historical anthropology) Alisa Ten, founded the baroque ensemble Two Daughters and prepared a number of programs at the intersection authentic, folk and contemporary music.
But it was still fame in the narrow circles of music lovers in St. Petersburg. The real breakthrough came in the summer of 2021, when this duet, together with the versatile double bass player Vladimir Volkov (currently, among other things, a permanent member of the Auktyon rock band) and another violist, Vladimir Gavryushov, released the Eliot Songs album. As you might guess, it is in the poetry of T. S. Eliot. It was more difficult to expect that the old viola da gamba would suddenly begin to give out a serious swing on the gut strings on it.
And at the beginning of last year, Pozyumsky and like-minded people who united in the Novoselie ensemble prepared (and also recorded) the program “Glorious World”. In it, taking as a basis “Peter’s cantes” – a special Russian “transitional” musical genre of the early 18th century – he composed a dozen of his own author’s songs. Played and sung as if it were not 2022, but 1722. And European music is as new in Russia as European dress.
The current full-scale requiem is a natural continuation of this musical and human history. And most importantly – this approach: to use ancient music and ancient sound production not as a museum piece, from which you can only carefully blow off dust particles, but as a basis for living contemporary creativity that responds to the needs and concerns of the day – as the requiems of Mozart, Verdi and Britten responded to them . “Listeners of the requiem will find themselves “in the space between church reading, rapper reading and folklore ritual slander,” follows from the poster of the event. Such a modern approach may alert the guardians of the purity of authenticity.
For each part of his requiem, the composer himself wrote Russian poetic texts that only remotely echo the canonical Latin ones. “Lord, have mercy on us sinners, Your inconsolable children from eternity!” – so begins his Kyrie eleison. “I take the main idea, the main approach of Martin Luther,” the composer explained to Vedomosti, “to make the text of the service understandable for a modern person.”
Such a composition as a requiem is a serious test not only of the composer’s, but also of the author’s spiritual strength. And he himself is aware of this. “These psalms, designed either as church readings, or as a rap battle, carrying a canonical idea, but told in the categories of today, have become for me a certain amount of experience of the last two years. Experience and human, and composer and poetic,” admits Pozyumsky.
#Requiem #baroque #Dawn #Vedomosti