Limits of Control. Alexey Sysoev, C-Jam Club Jazz Orchestra, Yaroslav Timofeev

Alexey Sysoev recomposes Igor Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” for big band.

Please be aware that the concert is a standing event.

GES-2 House of Culture continues its series of concerts in which leading Russian composers of our time engage in a dialogue with crucial musical texts of the past, offering different forms of interaction with the source, from careful reconstruction to total dismantlement.

Programme

Alexey Sysoev (b. 1972)
Limits of Control, 2025
Concerto for Big Band and Percussion Quartet on Themes from Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (world premiere).
Commissioned by GES-2 House of Culture

Performed by

C-Jam Club Jazz Orchestra

Georgy Gorbov conductor

Evsevy Zubkov percussion
Philipp Fitin percussion
Denis Zhukov percussion

Yaroslav Timofeev concert host

Illustration: Evgenia Tut

Following Raskol (2023) by Anton Svetlichny, a “composed interpretation” of Modest Mussorgsky’s grand opera Khovanshchina, and the collective Tristan Project (2024), which explored the creative method of Richard Wagner, in 2025 it is the turn of another Russian contemporary composer, Alexey Sysoev. In his new score, Sysoev listens carefully to Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, one of the key art works of the twentieth century and a defining moment in the development of musical modernism. The composer and conductor Pierre Boulez has given an adequate summary of Stravinsky’s ground-breaking ballet score, which was first performed in Paris in 1913: “The Rite of Spring serves as a point of reference to all who seek to establish the birth certificate of what is still called ‚contemporary‘ music. A kind of manifesto work, somewhat in the same way and probably for the same reasons as Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, it has not ceased to engender, first, polemics, then, praise, and, finally, the necessary clarifications.”

“What medium can possibly convey the incredible, hellish energy of Stravinsky’s music? I heard echoes of it in the sound of the jazz orchestra,” Sysoev says, explaining the concept of Limits of Control. Written for big band and a quartet of percussionists, Sysoev’s composition includes interludes of extended improvisation and implies a variety of scenarios of interaction between audience and sound. The world premiere of the work, commissioned by GES-2 House of Culture, will take place on the Prospekt, where listeners can wander as they please, changing their acoustic focus, comparing their sound impressions, and building an individual musical dramaturgy for the evening.

Georgy Gorbov (b. 1985, Moscow) is a conductor and saxophonist. He graduated from the Maimonides Academy in Moscow and completed a period of study at Berklee College of Music in the United States. Since 2004, he has headed the C-Jam Club Youth Cultural Centre, which he founded together with Dmitry Gorbov. He has been the conductor of the C-Jam Club Jazz Orchestra since 2005.

C-Jam Club Jazz Orchestra is one of Moscow’s leading big bands. The Orchestra has worked with Valery Ponomarev, Brian Irvine, Michael Abene, John Marshall, and other international jazz musicians. The Orchestra performs regularly at the best Moscow jazz clubs and also at the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall, the Moscow House of Music, and other major venues.

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.