The Iliad. Canto XXIII

Celebrating Vladimir Martynov’s eightieth birthday with Ekaterina Antonenko and the Intrada vocal ensemble.

Programme

Vladimir Martynov (b. 1946)
Iliad. Canto XXIII, 2003
For mixed a cappella choir, based on texts from the poem by Homer

GES-2 House of Culture celebrates the birthday of composer Vladimir Martynov with a performance of his most important work of the 2000s—the music for Anatoly Vasiliev’s play The Iliad. Canto XXIII. The Burial of Patroclus. Games, which was staged in 2004 at the School of Dramatic Art in Moscow.

Performed by

Intrada Vocal Ensemble

Ekaterina Antonenko conductor

Alexander Suvorov percussion

Yaroslav Timofeev concert host

Photo: Anya Todich

The production, which instantly became a legend of the Russian stage, was described by critic Roman Dolzhansky: “Vasiliev and Martynov dissect and scatter the stanzas, squeezing or shouting Homer out of themselves in words or syllables. They do not relate or appropriate the Iliad; they exhaust the text, free themselves from it and thereby commune with the myth.”

Martynov’s choral music has been a key element in many productions at the School of Dramatic Art—"a theatre based on speech and ritual, on the rite of the word as such," as Vasiliev put it. Iliad was the third collaboration between the composer and the director, following the Lamentations of Jeremiah (1996) and Mozart and Salieri (2000). Describing their cooperation, the art historian Zara Abdullaeva wrote that, “Martynov reached out to Vasiliev on the border between an art-ificial (from the word ‘art’) and a sacred space.”

Shortly after Vasiliev was expelled from his own theatre in 2006, Iliad was permanently removed from the repertoire of the School of Dramatic Art. An album with a recording of the music for the play, released in 2011 by the Long Arms Records, became an instant cult classic, but Martynov’s score has not been performed on stage since 2006. As part of the Collective Actions concert series, the work will be performed by musicians of the new generation: Intrada Vocal Ensemble and conductor Ekaterina Antonenko.

Vladimir Martynov wrote in his sleeve notes to the 2011 disc:

“For the Iliad, Vasiliev created a special choir at his theatre, and my work with this choir was less like composing and more like working in a rock group. We worked together, trying things, experimenting, rejecting and trying again until we achieved the desired result. My goal was to combine archaic formulas and archaic articulation with minimalist techniques that made the best match with Vasiliev’s studies and devices for Iliad, which were based largely on the principles of Eastern martial arts. I tried to fit as organically as possible into the situation created by Vasiliev, to make the music an integral part of it. But it seems to me that the Iliad music can also be listened to on its own.”

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, Intrada was voted Ensemble of the Year in Russia by the newspaper Muzikalnoe Obozrenie. The ensemble collaborates regularly 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.

Yaroslav Timofeev (b. 1988, Novgorod) is a musicologist, lecturer, and regular concert host at GES-2 House of Culture. 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.