Anti-formalist Rayok

Tristan and Isolde dance a quadrille, Schoenberg disses Stravinsky, Shostakovich laughs through tears.

Programme

Emmanuel Chabrier (1841–1894)
Souvenir de Munich, 1885–1886
Fantasia in the form of a quadrille on themes from “Tristan and Isolde” by Wagner
for piano four-hands

Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951)
Three Satires for Mixed Choir, Op. 28 (1925)
I. Am Scheideweg: Tonal oder atonal
(“At the Crossroads: Tonal or Atonal”)
II. Vielseitigkeit
(“Versatility”)
III. Der neue Klassizismus
(“The New Classicism”)

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975)
Antiformalist Rayok, 1948–1968
for bass, mixed choir, and piano

In the first concert of the Music Unbound series, artistic manifestos from different eras and contexts tell how music responds to the attempted imposition of rigid aesthetic and ideological norms.

Performed by

Intrada vocal ensemble
Ekaterina Antonenko conductor

Sergei Kasprov piano
Ekaterina Derzhavina piano
Garry Agadzhanyan bass

Yaroslav Timofeev concert host

Illustration: Anastasia Filippova

After the French lost the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), German culture was banished from Paris. This applied first and foremost to performances of the music of Richard Wagner: his satirical play Eine Kapitulation (1873) was understood in France as gloating over the French defeat and a ban was imposed on the performance of his works. However, by the mid-1880s, the composer of The Ring of the Nibelung had transformed in the minds of French cultural trendsetters from persona non grata to demi-god. Emmanuel Chabrier was rare among French musicians in refusing to adapt his tastes to match politics or public opinion. He maintained his admiration for the German composer through the dark days of war, but later, on the twentieth anniversary of the premiere of Tristan and Isolde, he composed the four-hand piano piece, Souvenirs de Munich (1885–1886), a “fantasy in the form of a quadrille,” which treats motifs from Wagner’s iconic late Romantic score in a light-hearted and mocking vein. Declaring love for his idol in this way, Chabrier reminds us that irony is the flip side of tenderness.

Arnold Schoenberg’s Three Satires (1925) are a much less playful expression of one artist’s strong feelings about another. This bitter choral pamphlet, the culmination of the Austrian composer’s aesthetic enmity towards the Russian-born leader of musical neoclassicism, Igor Stravinsky, might be a theoretical manifesto for the musical quest of the founder of the Second Viennese School. Stravinsky is pilloried as “little Modernsky with his hair cut in a pigtail ... Just like daddy Bach (or so little Modernsky likes to think)!” But he is not the only target of the Three Satires: Schoenberg lashes out at all those he considered his personal enemies in musical matters—composers who seek inspiration in the past, who work with folk music and any others who, as Schoenberg thought, made fashion rather than inner necessity the touchstone of their music. Perhaps the most accurate definition of the musical genre of the Three Satires is to be found in hip-hop: Schoenberg wrote history’s first-ever diss track.

“The time of manifestos is a time when the artist loses common ground with his audience, when it is vitally important for him to say what no one wants—or is able—to hear.” The formula of art historian Olga Fedyanina is the best explanation of what drove Dmitri Shostakovich to compose his Antiformalist Rayok (1948–1968). On 13 January 1948, a “Meeting of Soviet music workers” hosted by the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party established a framework for socialist realism in music and condemned the work of some of the country’s greatest composers, from Shostakovich to Prokofiev and Khachaturian, as anti-narodny (“anti-popular”). Shostakovich vented his frustration in a piece of musical satire, based on Modest Mussorgsky’s musical pamphlet, Rayok from 1870. The piece is a grotesque mini-opera, which casts Communist Party officials as its characters and uses quotes from their speeches in the libretto (in old Russia a rayok, or “little heaven”, was a peep show in a box, often with lewd captions). Shostakovich wrote the work secretly—"for his desk“, as Russians say—and it was never performed in his lifetime. With characteristic understatement Shostakovich gave his work the subtitle: “As an aid to students: the struggle of the realistic and formalistic directions in music.”

Intrada vocal ensemble was founded in 2006 by Ekaterina Antonenko, a graduate of the Moscow Conservatory. It has taken part in many high-profile projects in Russia and abroad, and has won renown as an exceptionally versatile and professional vocal group. In 2019 and 2021, it was voted Ensemble of the Year by the newspaper Muzikalnoe Obozrenie. Intrada regularly collaborates with leading ensembles and musicians in Russia and abroad, including the Moscow Soloists chamber orchestra and Yuri Bashmet, the Svetlanov Symphony Orchestra and Vladimir Jurowski, the Russian National Orchestra and Mikhail Pletnev, Le Poème Harmonique and Vincent Dumestre, Il Giardino Armonico and Giovanni Antonini, The Tallis Scholars and Peter Phillips, VOCES8, I Fagiolini and Robert Hollingworth, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Frieder Bernius, Stephen Layton, Hans-Christoph Rademann, Peter Neumann, Jean-Christophe Spinosi, and many others. The ensemble has also performed at the “December Nights of Sviatoslav Richter” at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

Sergei Kasprov (b. 1979, Moscow) is a pianist, harpsichordist, and organist. He studied historical performance on keyboard instruments at the Moscow Conservatory under Alexei Lyubimov and organ under Alexei Parshin. Kasprov completed postgraduate studies as a pianist, also at the Moscow Conservatory, and trained at Schola Cantorum in Paris under Igor Lazko. In 2005–2007, he was awarded a special prize at the International Competition for Young Pianists in Memory of Vladimir Horowitz in Geneva, the Grand Prix at the Maria Yudina International Competition for Young Pianists in Moscow, and the first prize at the Rubinstein and Scriabin competitions in Paris. He is a regular participant of piano festivals in Europe and Russia, including La Roque-d’Anthéron (France), Klarafestival (Belgium), Chopin and His Europe (Poland), Arts Square (Saint Petersburg), December Evenings and Antiquarium (Moscow).

Ekaterina Derzhavina (b. 1967, Moscow) is a pianist and graduate of the Gnessin Academy of Music, where she studied with Vladimir Tropp. Since 2003, she has taught at the Department of Historical and Contemporary Performing Arts, which is part of the Moscow Conservatory. She is a regular participant in the La Roque-d’Anthéron and La folle journée piano festivals (France), Oberstdorfer Musiksommer and Thüringer Bachwochen (Germany). She was co-organiser of the Medtner Festival (Moscow), together with Boris Berezovsky. Her discography includes around 20 albums released by the record companies Arte Nova, Phoenix, and Profil and she is a winner of the the Diapason d’or and Choc du Monde de la Musique awards.

Garry Agadzhanyan (b. 1977, Yerevan) is a singer and soloist at the Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre. He graduated from the Ural State Conservatory. He has worked with the Bolshoi Theatre, the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Music Theatre and the Mikhailovsky Theatre, as well as taking part in projects by Teodor Currentzis. He has worked with directors including Romeo Castellucci, Philipp Himmelmann, Valentina Carrasco, Vasily Barkhatov, Marat Gatsalov, Philipp Grigorian, Vladislavs Nastaševs, and Evgenia Safonova. Agadzhanyan has won awards at international vocal competitions and the Onegin National Opera Prize competition.

Yaroslav Timofeev (b. 1988, Novgorod) is a musicologist, concert presenter, and lecturer. He is a graduate of the Moscow Conservatory, chief editor of Musikalnaya Akademia 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.