The Season of Phantasmal Peace

The new GES-2 curatorial programme offers a history of the search for scale and detail in music, exploring the architecture of large musical forms in the projections of various epochs and styles.

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“Light is vision, vision is contemplation, contemplation is time”: the formula of art historian Anna Tolstova weaves together the themes of a concert series that ranges from the First Symphony of Gustav Mahler to the world premiere of a work written specially for the occasion by one of the leaders of the post-Soviet music scene, Valery Voronov. What is distinctive in the work of the Berlin-based Belarusian composer is its special attention to sound matter—vibrating, filled with magical radiance, intensely aware of its own fragility and power. Voronov’s approach resonates with Mahler’s instruction to performers, written on the first page of his First Symphony—"Wie ein Naturlaut" ("Like a sound of nature“),—and the entire work is suffused with ringing silence. As the composer said, explaining his idea, “We find ourselves in a forest where the sunlight trembles and shimmers through the branches.” Both scores are inspired by literary sources: a prose work by the German pre-Romantic author, Jean Paul, in the case of Mahler and a poem by Nobel Prize winner, Derek Walcott, for Voronov (the title of the poem is also the title of the GES-2 concert series). Both composers immerse the listener in contemplation of the gradual unfolding of musical fabric, the mystery of sound solidifying and then melting away.

Programme 

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Illustration: Danila Travin

The Season of Phantasmal Peace concert series explores how large musical form creates a poetic picture of the world in the work of composers from four centuries: Ludwig van Beethoven and Galina Ustvolskaya, Morton Feldman and Dmitry Shostakovich, Henry Purcell and Benjamin Britten. The programme draws parallels and reveals connections between the music of composers who do not often meet in the concert hall. Each of them might echo the words of Mark Rothko: “The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you are moved only by their colour relationships, then you miss the point!” Behind each of the protagonists there is “not a style, but a world” (Zara Abdullaeva), a world whose elements partake of the mystical. Some, like Ustvolskaya and Beethoven, create powerful force fields around themselves, while others, following Mahler, Schubert and Shostakovich, turn their gaze to the rarefied space of “mountain peaks, where everything is slowed down to a sense of prostration” (Dmitry Ukhov on the music of Morton Feldman). The epic canvases presented in the eight concerts of the cycle are united by heightened expressiveness and the sense of a rupture in the universe, which they expose or overcome, halting the passage of time and drawing the listener into their world.

Curator
Dmitry Renansky

This season, tickets for concerts at GES-2 House of Culture can be bought in advance at a discount. Ticket prices will increase closer to the date of the event. For more details, see the concert page.

Producers
Ekaterina Arkhipova, Marina Badudina, Ksenia Makshantseva, Yana Romashkina

Programme

Tree of Life

When: 10 Sep
Gustav Mahler. Symphony no. 1
Performers: Fyodor Lednev, Speech Ensemble
Hosted by: Yaroslav Timofeev

Winterreise

Tickets

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When: 18 Sep
Franz Schubert
Performers: Natalia Buklaga, Sergei Kasprov