Alpha and Omega. Fedor Lednev, Elene Gvritishvili, Yaroslav Timofeev

The universe of the human voice in the vocal music of Alexey Sysoev, Giya Kancheli, and György Ligeti.

Programme

Giya Kancheli (1935–2019).
Psalm 23 (1993)
Exile (1994)

György Ligeti (1923–2006)
New Adventures (1965)

Alexey Sysoev (b. 1972)
Apocalypse Online (2024)
First performance in Russia

In the first concert of the Music Hi(stories) series, the Russian premiere of Alexey Sysoev’s new work Apocalypse Online (2024), written to the text of the Book of Revelation, enters into dialogue with works by Giya Kancheli and György Ligeti. Working with language in different ways, these twentieth-century masters propose radically different scenarios for the interaction between stage and audience.

Performed by

Fyodor Lednev conductor
Elene Gvritishvili soprano

Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble | MCME
N’CAGED Vocal Ensemble
Silence Quartet

Illustration: Yevgenia Tut

“If a person enters a church, synagogue, or mosque when there is no service going on, they hear a special, incomparable, and magical silence. My task is to turn this silence into music.” Such was the artistic credo of Giya Kancheli, a composer who was preoccupied with the sacred nature of words, true to the maxim of the symbolist poet, Maximilian Voloshin, for whom words were “the original essence of all things.” Kancheli’s music is always part of a magical ritual that turns the concert hall into a space of spiritual practice. In the early 1990s, he wrote a series of scores for voice and instrumental ensemble inspired by biblical texts. Based on quiet and simple melodic devices, they are reminiscent of Georgian folk chants. The centrepiece of the series is Psalm 23 (“The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall want for nothing,” 1993) for soprano and five singers. A recording of the work, released in 1995 on the ECM label, quickly became a legend of contemporary music.

In the early 1960s, one of the chief figures of the post-war avant-garde, the Hungarian composer György Ligeti, was briefly close to the performance art movement, Fluxus. The influence of Fluxus, which deconstructed the canons of bourgeois art and lifestyles by playing on discrepancies between audience expectations and the artist’s actions, is most evident in Adventures (1962) and New Adventures (1965), works composed by Ligeti for three voices and seven instruments. Written in an invented language consisting of individual phonemes, interjections, moans, wheezes, and laughter, these mini-operas challenge assumptions about the relationship between text and music, and make light of the traditional devices of vocal art. They represent a milestone in the history of twentieth-century musical theatre. Ligeti’s absurdist diptych works directly with the acoustic perception of the audience, setting opera free from the power of narrative.

Fyodor Lednev (b. 1971, Minsk) is a conductor. He graduated from the Saint Petersburg Conservatory specialising in choral conducting (1995) and operatic and symphonic conducting (1998). Since 1995, he has taught at the Saint Petersburg Rimsky-Korsakov Music College. He has appeared as guest conductor with leading Russian orchestras, including the Svetlanov State Orchestra, the Russian National Orchestra, the Russian National Youth Symphony Orchestra, the musicAeterna Choir and Orchestra, and others. He has been the resident conductor of musicAeterna since 2019.

Elene Gvritishvili (b. 1999, St. Petersburg) is a singer. She studied at the Saint Petersburg Rimsky-Korsakov Music College (conducting and choral department, class of Fyodor Lednev and Anna Meya) and the Saint Petersburg Conservatory (vocal department, class of Svetlana Gorenkova). In 2020–2022, she sang with the musicAeterna choir. In 2022–2024, she performed as part of the Bolshoi Theatre Youth Opera Programme. Since September 2024, she has performed with the Youth Opera Programme of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich.

Yaroslav Timofeev (b. 1988, Novgorod) is a musicologist, concert presenter, and lecturer. He is a graduate of the Moscow Conservatory, chief editor of Musical Academy magazine, and has worked since 2010 at the Moscow Philharmonic Society (Russia’s largest concert organisation) where he leads a number of projects: Mum, I’m Crazy about Music (since the 2017/2018 season), The Language of Music (co‑author and presenter since 2018/2019), Thing-in-Itself (author and presenter since 2021/2022), and All Stravinsky (author and presenter since 2022/2023). He has performed since 2017 as pianist with the Russian indie group, OQJAV.