Collective Actions

“Parsifal” at the car park, Alexei Lubimov with a “Lecture on Nothing”, Vladimir Martynov’s “Iliad”, and other legends and myths in the new musical programme at GES-2.

In ancient times, sound, word, and gesture were an inseparable whole. What would later become music, theatre, and dance took shape within rituals and ceremonies, where specific actions were performed according to a scenario dictated by tradition and where song and music making were integral to the connection between people and world. Ancient Greek tragedy grew out of the Dionysian mysteries; medieval street performances were based on Gospel stories. The oldest forms of theatre were organised primarily by music and involved the whole of a city, where people were both spectators and performers, watching the spectacle and taking part in it. The gradual secularisation of culture made theatre and music independent, but they remained keenly aware of one another. As important parts of social life, they played the role that in traditional societies was assigned to ritual, bringing members of the community together as a single body.

Programme 

Photo: Anya Todich

The secret nostalgia, the ultimate ambition of theatre is to somehow rediscover the ritual that engendered it.

— Thomas Mann

Theatre strives to revive time, to objectify it. Music wants to absorb time, to abstract it. Both vaguely remember the ritualistic past. Musical theatre is their combined force.

— Boris Filanovsky

The history of music might be seen as the story of the reinvention of this original unity. Turning to the beginnings of art in religious observance, forward-looking composers of different eras have found inspiration in archaic forms, synthesising new artistic languages by making tradition into a thing of the present. The Collective Actions curatorial programme explores various forms of dialogue between music and theatre that are located in a border zone between the secular and the spiritual, concert and performance, art and ritual, sensuality and mysticism, and that transform this indefinite space into a poetic device. All of the composers whose works will be featured in Collective Actions, from the last Viennese classic, Ludwig van Beethoven, to the Greek revolutionary, Jani Christou, and from the father of new music, Arnold Schoenberg, to the central figure of contemporary composition, Helmut Lachenmann, are committed in their own way to the task of restoring to music its sacred nature.

The eight concerts in the series bring together key works by composers for whom, as the art historian Zara Abdullaeva has said, “Looking backwards meant moving forward.” Reinterpreting the relationship between words and music, Mozart’s contemporary Jiří Antonín Benda invented the new stage genre of melodrama in his Medea (1775). Our contemporary Vladimir Martynov revives the ontological passion of ancient tragedy in Iliad (2003). Alexei Lubimov returns to the House of Culture with a performance of John Cage’s seminal twentieth-century work Lecture on Nothing (1949). Parsifal (1882), the opera for which Richard Wagner invented the term “Bühnenweihfestspiel” (“festival play for consecration of the stage”) unfolds in the prosaic space of the GES-2’s Parking. Revisiting the relationship between stage and auditorium, Collective Actions looks to myth-making as a tool for understanding contemporary reality and the contemporary human condition.

Programme

The Twentieth Century Approaches

Tickets

When: 25 Jan

Claude Debussy, Arnold Schoenberg

Performers
Fedor Lednev, Ekaterina Protsenko, Boulez Ensemble

Bogdan Korolek concert host

Medea

Tickets

When: 10 Feb

Jiří Antonín Benda

Performers
Daria Zhovner, Igor Gordin, Fedor Beznosikov, Pratum Integrum Orchestra

Lecture on Nothing

Tickets will be available later

When: 16 Feb

John Cage

Performers
Alexei Lubimov and Co

Yaroslav Timofeev concert host

Iliad. Song XXIII

Tickets will be available later

When: 30 Mar

Vladimir Martynov

Performers
Ekaterina Antonenko, Intrada Vocal Ensemble

The Seven Last Words

Tickets will be available later

When: 14 Apr

Joseph Haydn

Performers
Speech Quartet

Yaroslav Timofeev concert host

Parsifal. Synopsis

Tickets will be available later

When: 4–5 Apr

Richard Wagner

Performers
Fedor Beznosikov, Boulez Ensemble

Yaroslav Timofeev concert host

Missa Solemnis

Tickets will be available later

When: 17 Apr

Ludwig van Beethoven

Performers
Fedor Lednev, Pratum Integrum Orchestra

Yaroslav Timofeev concert host

The Sound and the Fury

Tickets will be available later

When: 19 июнJun

Helmut Lachenmann, Jani Christou, Claude Debussy

Performers
Fedor Lednev, Boulez Ensemble

Yaroslav Timofeev concert host