Ophelia's Songs. Solo concert by Elena Gvritishvili

Rarities of vocal music from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the solo debut of one of the finest Russian singers of the younger generation.

Programme

Franz Liszt (1811–1886)
Lorelei, S. 273, 1843

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971)
Three Japanese Lyrics, 1913

Maurice Ravel (1875–1937)
Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, 1913

Karol Szymanowski (1882–1937)
Songs of the Infatuated Muezzin, Op. 42, 1918

Hector Berlioz (1803–1869)
La mort d’Ophélie, H. 92, 1842

The soprano Elene Gvritishvili is already well known to audiences at GES-2 House of Culture. For her first-ever solo concert, she has selected a programme that runs the gamut of extreme states: the romance of madness, escape into parallel realities, and existence on the border between the familiar world and its underside.

Performed by

Elene Gvritishvili soprano

Sergei Kasprov piano

Illustration: Anastasia Filippova

The evening begins with a setting by Franz Liszt of Lorelei, Heinrich Heine’s poem about a siren girl on the Rhine who lures passing boatmen to shipwreck by her song. It is followed by another female image of the Romantic era: La mort d’Ophélie by Hector Berlioz shares with Liszt’s ballad the theme of Liebestod—the indissoluble unity and mutual reversibility of love and death.

The mysterious and supposedly irrational world of the East exercised an attraction for European composers in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One of the most charming pages of Russian musical Orientalism is Igor Stravinsky’s Three Japanese Lyrics, inspired by the peculiarities of Japanese phonetics, which compensate for the absence of stress in their language by rising or falling tones in a sentence. Stravinsky dedicated the first of his three miniatures to Maurice Ravel, who responded with a symmetrical dedication of the first of his Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé. The works of the two composers were given their premieres side by side in Paris in 1914.

The key motifs of Elene Gvritishvili’s programme then converge in the vocal cycle Songs of the Infatuated Muezzin by two classics of twentieth-century Polish culture, the composer Karol Szymanowski and writer Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz. This masterpiece of musical modernism received its first performance in Russia in the early 1940s, when Sviatoslav Richter accompanied the soprano Nina Dorliak, and was taken up again in the 1980s by Dorliak’s student Galina Pisarenkova. The piece has been performed only very occasionally in Russia since that time and its return to the big concert stage will be the highlight of the evening at GES-2.

Elene Gvritishvili (b. 1999, Saint Petersburg) 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.

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).

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.