Minusbolero

The melodies and rhythms of the Dow Jones, the stolen Mona Lisa, and other manifestos of musical conceptualism, performed by the Boulez Ensemble and Philipp Chizhevsky.

Programme

Johannes Kreidler (b. 1980)

Outsourcing, 2009 

Two Pieces for Clarinet and Video, 2016 

Charts Music, 2009

Minusbolero, 2010–2014

Themes and subjects which are central to the musical programme of GES-2 House of Culture—the ways in which music communicates with the audience, performers, and those who commission it, the ethics and economics of the creative process, and art’s reflection on its own production and on issues of authorship—are closely interwoven in the work of the forty-six-year-old German composer, Johannes Kreidler. He is one of the few contemporary composers whose reputation extends beyond the world of contemporary music. His works, which straddle the line between performance, stand-up comedy and academic lecture, are inspired by internet meme culture and break records for the number of their views on social media.

Performed by

Boulez Ensemble

Philipp Chizhevsky conductor

Bogdan Korolyok concert host

I didn’t write a single note in this piece. Even less than that—all I did was to take notes away. Ravel’s Bolero minus the melody. That took about an hour. And yet I’ve never worked on a piece for as long as on this one—five years. Composing this piece—writing it or rather erasing it—was much harder than writing 100,000 notes.

— Johannes Kreidler, “Minusbolero”

The composer turns the Dow Jones index and prices of the stocks of leading international companies into music, compressing all the songs of the Beatles and Beethoven’s nine symphonies into one second of sound under the slogan “Time is relative!” and, in one of his performances, paralyses the work of the German copyright society, GEMA. Poet, philosopher, and trickster, Kreidler muses on the links between music and politics, economics and new technologies, on how the art market functions in the context of globalisation and how the identity of the artist is shaped in the age of the digital archive, when the entire history of art is available at the click of a button.

In 2025, GES-2 presented Russia’s first retrospective of Kreidler’s work (the magazine Musikalnaya Akademiya published the composer’s seminal essay, “Minusbolero”, translated into Russian by Anastasia Kazakova, to mark the occasion). The Boulez Ensemble and conductor Philipp Chizhevsky open the Gala. Five Years of Music programme with a performance of four of the composer’s most important works, which have already made their mark as classics of contemporary art.

Philipp Chizhevsky (b. 1984, Moscow) is a conductor. He graduated from the Moscow Conservatory where he studied choral conducting with Stanislav Kalinin and operatic and symphonic conducting with Valery Polyansky. Since 2011, he has been a teacher at the Conservatory as well as conductor of the State Symphony Capella of Russia (Valery Polyansky is artistic director of the Capella). Since 2014 he has been a guest conductor at the Bolshoi Theatre, where he led the world premiere of Sergej Newski’s opera Francis (2012) and the Russian premiere of Jacques Offenbach’s La Périchole (2019). Other operatic productions under Chizhevsky’s baton include the series Drillalians (2015) and The Nonsensorics of Dreems (2022) at the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre, as well as Georges Bizet’s Carmen (2021) and Richard Wagner’s Flying Dutchman (2023) at the Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre. Philipp Chizhevsky won the prize for best work by a conductor in Russia’s Golden Mask National Theatre Awards and the BraVo International Music Award in the Opera of the Year category for his production of Handel’s The Triumph of Time and Disillusion. Since 2024, Philipp Chizhevsky has been Artistic Director of the Svetlanov State Symphony Orchestra.

Bogdan Korolyok (b. 1993, Omsk) is a curator and a music and theatre critic. He is assistant artistic director of the ballet company at the Ural Opera Ballet Theatre. He graduated from the Krasnoyarsk College of Choreography (class of Ivan Karnaukhov), obtained a bachelor’s degree in arts and humanities at the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet and a master’s degree in music criticism at Saint Petersburg State University. He created librettos for Le Divertissement du Roi at the Mariinsky Theatre (choreographed by Maxim Petrov, 2017/2021) and for The Order of the King (2018), The Humpbacked Horse (2021, with choreographer Vyacheslav Samodurov), and The Tales of Pierrot (2024, with choreographer Maxim Petrov) at the Ural Opera Ballet Theatre, as well as A Guide to Ballet at the Perm Opera Ballet Theatre (2021, choreographed by Anton Pimonov).