(Très) belle musique. Alexandre Rabinovitch-Barakovsky. Alexei Lyubimov and Co

The foremost Russian pianists of our time in a retrospective concert to mark the 80th birthday of Alexandre Rabinovitch-Barakovsky.

Programme

Alexandre Rabinovitch-Barakovsky (b. 1945)
Musique triste, parfois tragique (1976)
Die Zeit (2000)
Élans (2020, world premiere)
Musique populaire (1980)

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–1788)
Franz Schubert (1797–1828)
Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992)
Works for piano from the repertoire of Alexander Rabinovitch-Barakovsky

GES-2 House of Culture celebrates the 80th birthday of one of the heroes of new Russian music—the composer, conductor and pianist Alexandre Rabinovitch-Barakovsky, who was virtually forgotten in his homeland after emigrating to France in 1974. In 2023, the Prospekt at GES-2 hosted the Russian premiere of the symphony Spells (1996), the quintessence of the composer’s style, under the baton of Philipp Chizhevsky. The composer turns the commonplace idioms and clichés of the classical and romantic repertoire into repetitive patterns, developing the ideas of Steve Reich and Philip Glass. But whereas the American minimalists were inspired by Eastern philosophy, Rabinovitch-Barakovsky’s music is Western through and through. True to the legacy of Liszt and Rachmaninoff, he keeps alive the tradition of virtuoso writing by pianist-composers that has all but disappeared today. Rabinovitch-Barakovsky was the first in the USSR to perform Olivier Messiaen’s Vingt regards sur l’Enfant Jésus (composed in 1944), Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata (1915) and other milestone works of twentieth-century piano music. After emigration he made a classic recording of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations (1823).

Performed by

Alexei Lyubimov piano

Sergei Davydchenko piano
Pavel Dombrovsky piano
Sergei Kasprov piano, celeste
Arseny Tarasevich-Nikolaev piano
Yury Favorin piano

Maria Fedotova flute
Marina Katarzhnova violin
Olga Demina cello

Illustration: Evgenia Tut

Few composers of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries have written so much and such varied music for the piano, and the works of Rabinovitch-Barakovsky have become a part of the repertoire of such piano virtuosi as Martha Argerich.

At the birthday concert the composer’s works will be interpreted by leading Russian pianists of different generations, from Alexei Lyubimov, who co-curates the evening, to the twenty-year-old Sergei Davydchenko, winner of the most recent Tchaikovsky Competition. The first large-scale retrospective of Rabinovitch-Barakovsky’s music in many years covers all stages of his work: the post-avant-garde classics Musique triste, parfois tragique (1976) and Musique populaire (1980) are juxtaposed with the quartet Die Zeit (2000) and the world premiere of Élans (2020). The concert also includes works by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Franz Schubert, and Olivier Messiaen, all of whom have featured prominently in Rabinovitch-Barakovsky’s repertoire and influenced the development of his compositional style.

Alexei Lyubimov (b. 1944) — a pianist, harpsichordist, organist, and conductor. He studied with Anna Artobolevskaya at the Central School of Music and with Heinrich Neuhaus and Lev Naumov at the Moscow Conservatory. He is the founder and leader of the Music—20th Century ensemble, which has given Russian premieres of works by many contemporary composers. Since 1997, Alexei Lyubimov has headed the Faculty of Historical and Contemporary Performance Art at the Moscow Conservatory, which he founded in collaboration with Natalia Gutman and Nazar Kozhukhar. Since 1998, he has been a professor at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg. His discography includes some fifty albums issued by ECM, Erato, BIS, Sony, Decca, Megadisc, and Melodiya.

Sergei Davydchenko (b. 2004) — a student of piano at the Rostov Conservatory, a pupil of Sergei Osipenko. He was the winner of the third International Grand Piano Competition for Young Pianists (Moscow, 2021) and the seventeenth International Tchaikovsky Competition (Moscow, 2023).

Pavel Dombrovsky (b. 1982) — a pianist. He studied with Vera Nosina at the Moscow Secondary Specialised Music School and with Lev Naumov and Andrei Diev at the Moscow Conservatory. He has won prizes at the International Long-Thibault-Crespin Competition (Paris, 2004), the twelfth International Tchaikovsky Competition (Moscow, 2002) and elsewhere. He is Associate Professor of the Special Piano Department at the Gnesin Academy of Music in Moscow.

Sergey Kasprov (b. 1979) — a pianist, harpsichordist, and organist. He studied with Alexei Lyubimov. Awards include the special prize at the Vladimir Horowitz International Competition for Young Pianists in Geneva, the grand prix at the Maria Yudina International Competition for Young Pianists in Moscow, and first prize at the Rubinstein and Scriabin competitions in Paris. He is a regular participant of piano festivals in Europe and Russia.

Arseny Tarasevich-Nikolaev (b. 1993, Moscow) — a pianist. He studied at the Central Music School with Alexander Mndoyants and at the Moscow Conservatory with Sergei Dorensky. At the age of nineteen he won the Scriabin International Piano Competition in Moscow and went on to win prizes at competitions in Cleveland, Bergen and Sydney. His competition successes led to a recording contract with Decca Classics and Universal Music. In June 2022 he took a silver medal at the first International Rachmaninoff Competition for Pianists, Composers and Conductors.

Yury Favorin (b. 1986) — a pianist. After graduating from the Moscow Conservatory, he pursued further studies there with Mikhail Voskresensky and at the Mozarteum in Salzburg with Jacques Rouvier. He performs as a soloist and with leading symphonic and chamber orchestras in Russia, Europe and Japan. He also works with composer Alexei Sysoev and percussionist Dmitry Shchelkin in the improvisational ensemble Error 404.

Maria Fedotova (b. 1971) — a flautist and graduate of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. Since 2012, she has been a soloist with the Symphony Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre. She has given solo concerts at the Musikverein in Vienna, the Philharmonie and the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris and at the Musikhalle in Hamburg. She regularly collaborates with Vladimir Jurowski, Teodor Currentzis, Gidon Kremer, Alexander Rudin, and other outstanding musicians. Maria Fedotova is Associate Professor at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory and holds the title of Honoured Artist of Russia.

Marina Katarzhnova (b. 1979) — a violinist. She studied at the Moscow Secondary Specialised Music School with Natalia and Lydia Fikhtengoltz and at the Moscow Conservatory with Zarius Shikhmurzaeva, Nazar Kozhukhar, and Sergei Kravchenko. Since 2007, she has been a teacher at the Moscow Conservatory. Marina Katarzhnova has worked with the Pratum Integrum Orchestra and has been the concertmaster of the Persimfans Ensemble since its inception in 2009. She also founded the Gnessin Baroque Ensemble and is a soloist with the Studio for New Music. Since 2020 she has been Artistic Director of the Rosarium period-instrument orchestra.

Olga Demina (b. 1983) — a cellist. She held a scholarship at the New Names Foundation and is a soloist with the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, with which she has performed in many Russian and international premieres.