Alexei Liubimov performs piano and harpsichord pieces
written specially for and/or dedicated to him by Galina
Ustvolskaya, Pavel Karmanov, Victor Suslin, Valentin
Silvestrov and Vladimir Martynov.
From 1937 to 1939 Galina Ustvolskaya studied at
the Professional School of Music in Leningrad and from 1947
at the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory. Her composition
teachers were Georgy Rimsky-Korsakov (1957-1960) and Dimitri
Shostakovitch, who greatly admired her music and with whom
she apparently had a short affair. After her studies she
became a teacher for composition at the same conservatory
(1948-1977). Among her students were composers such as Boris
Tischchenko and Victor Kissin.
In 1966 she married Konstantin Makukhin. She has lived in
Saint Petersburg all of her life and still lives in her tiny
apartment in the Prospekt Gagarina. She lives like a hermit,
hardly getting out of her house and not in contact with
people. She doesn't give interviews and hates pictures being
taken.
Very few remarks of Ustvolskaya exist on her own music.
Famous ones are:
"My music is never chamber music, not even in the case of a
solo sonata".
"All who really love my music should refrain from
theoretical analysis of it..."
Ustvolskayas music sounds like nothing else. She is a very
original composer and it is hard to describe her music in
musical terms. The Dutch musicologist Elmer Schönberger
calls her The woman with the hammer while the Russian
composer Victor Suslin uses the term black hole, a galactic
constellation of such an enormous density, absorbing all
energy and light in it.
Many of her composition are extremely violent with dynamics
up to fffff. But on the other hand she always gives
instructions to perform her music espressivo, even with
dynamics like this and even if the sound comes from banging
a hammer on a wooden box (Composition No.2). The music is
rhythmic and many times even ritualistic. One could even
find traces of minimal music in her compositions. Some of
composition have religious subtitles, but she never was a
very religious woman in the usual sense of the word. For
her, religion is living together with nature, respecting
living creatures and even talking to birds and ants. Her
decision to live in seclusion is reflected in her music,
which also goes its own way.
In Russia it was very difficult for her to compose her 'own'
works. To please the government she wrote film scores and
patriotic music, filed in the Other Works section. In many
cases her serious works had to wait over 20 years for their
first performances.
The first time that her music was played outside of Russia
was probably in 1986 at the Wiener Festwochen, and later in
1988 at a festival in Heidelberg, Germany. Her breakthrough
in the west came around 1989 with concerts at the Holland
Festival in Amsterdam, and in 1992 the Festival of
Huddersfield. Ustvolskaya seldom visits concerts and has, as
far as I know, only been at one concert abroad (January 6,
1996 in Amsterdam, where Octet, Grand Duet, Piano Sonata
No.6 and Symphony No.2 were performed by the Royal
Concertgebouw Orchestra, Mstislav Rostropovitch, Reinbert de
Leeuw and Sergei Leiferkus).
(taken from
http://home.wanadoo.nl/eli.ichie/ustvolskaya.html)
Pavel Karmanov - a composer, and a member of
the Russian Composers Union. Graduated from Moscow
Conservatory in 1995. Pavel is famous primarily in the
musical world for his academic compositions and film scores,
such as "Gladiatrix" by Timur Bekmambetov, "Scarecrow"
(dir.A.Kott), "Closed Space" (dir.N.Egen), "Date"
(dir.A.Fenchenko).
His composition "Forellen Quintet" was the basis for a
documentary music film that we made for Greenpeace Russia.
Valentin Silvestrov was born in Kiev,
Ukraine, on September 30, 1937, arguably the darkest year in
the Russian history. He came rather late to music, beginning
study at 15, first privately and then at an evening music
school. By 1955, he graduated with a gold medal and enrolled
at the Kiev Institute of Construction Engineering; but three
years later Silvestrov began serious pursuit of music at the
Kiev Conservatory, studying with Lyatoshyns'ky and Revutsky.
Even with earliest works like the Piano Quintet (1961),
Silvestrov was already drawn to the dramatic potential in
contrasting strong tonality with strong atonality; in his
massive Third Symphony "Eskhatofoniya" (1966), this
preoccupation with polarities took the form of "cultural"
(strictly notated) sounds and "mysterious" (improvised)
ones. The place of magic and invocation - those elements
that always defy material, that arise only in the process
and afterwards - began to rest more firmly in Silvestrov's
works.
1971's gigantic Drama for piano trio - "virtually a clinical
study of an artistic crisis," Silvestrov's biographer writes
- was a breakthrough work. And it was beginning in 1973 that
Silvestrov embarked on his "metaphorical" or "allegorical"
style, strongly reminiscent of late-Romantic cliché, to
which he still adheres today - "metaphorical" because
Silvestrov knows these sounds to be irrefutably "past" and
has no interest in merely "resurrecting" them; and
"allegorical," because Silvestrov wishes to use this music
obliquely, as an estranged means rather than a predictable
end.
Silvestrov's Symphony No. 5 of 1982 is perhaps an ideal
symbol of this style: in its three-quarter-hour cycle of
nine slow movements, it "recycles" a whole world of banal,
almost kitschy melodies on its scarred, cloudy surface. But
underneath this floating music lies a tremendous complexity,
both technically and emotionally; the accumulative
expressive effect is undeniable and unexpected. Malcolm
MacDonald perhaps put it best when he wrote that the
"Russian sense of lamentation...reaches in Silvestrov a new
expressive stage: he seems to compose, not the lament
itself, but the lingering memory of it, the mood of sadness
that it leaves behind."
(taken from All-Music Guide web site)
Born in Moscow in 1946, Vladimir Martynov
studied the piano under M.Mezhlumov and composition under
N.Sidelnikov at the Moscow Conservatory, from which he
graduated in 1970-71. In his first large-scale works he
adopts the serial technique (Quartet, 1966 - Concerto for
oboe and for flute, 1968 - Hexagramme for piano, 1971 -
Sonata for violin and piano, 1973). In 1973 he began working
in the studio for electronic music of the Scriabin museum,
the meeting ground of many of the leading composers of the
Russian avante-garde, such as Denisov, Gubaidulina,
Schnittke, Nemtin and others. A rock-group, The Boomerang,
was formed in the studio with the active participation of
Martynov and for which he wrote the rock-opera The Seraphic
Visions of St.Francis of Assisi (1978). At the same time he
was exploring the possibilities of the minimalist system
simoultaneously with Arvo Part and Valentin Sylvestrov.
In additions, the extraordinary variety of his interests led
him to the study of folk music for which he travelled
extensively all over Russia, the Caucasus and Tadjikistan,
of theology, the history of religions and philosophy,
medieval Russian and Western music and religious musicology.
At the end of the 1970s he embarked on an investigation of
the early Russian religious chant, while also publishing
editions of works by Isaac, Machaut, Gabrieli, Dunstable and
Dufay. At this period he accepted a teaching post at the
Theological Institute of the Trinity-Saint Sergius. During
the period 1980-83 his output was mainly devoted to church
music. Then new works began to appear which combine the
experiments of former period, continuing his involvement
with minimalism (Opus post I, 1984, Opus post II for piano,
1996, Twelve Victories of King Arthur for seven pianos,
1990) and widening his explorations of the great religious
themes in works like Apocalypse (1991), Lamentations of
Jeremiah (1992), Magnificat (1993), Stabat Mater (1994),
Requiem (1998), Games of Humans and Angels (1999) and
Litanies to the Virgin (2000).
Alexei Lubimov was born in Moscow in 1944, and
began his musical training at the Central Music School in
1952. In 1963, he became a student at the Moscow
Conservatory, where he worked with Heinrich Neuhaus - the
celebrated teacher of such performers as Sviatolslav Richter
and Emil Gilels. While still a student at the Conservatory,
he won several prestigious competitions, including 1st Prize
at the International Piano Competition in Rio de Janeiro, in
1965. He also began performing in concert, such as at the
Warsaw Autumn Festival of Contemporary Music, in 1964.
Since his graduation from the Conservatory in 1968, Alexei
Lubimov has pursued an active career as a performer and has
recorded a wide array of music, an extensive sample of which
is provided here at the Classical Archives. From early in
his career, he has championed the works of modern composers,
and premiered numerous works of Soviet composers, such as
Schnittke, Demidov, Pärt, and Volkonsky; he also gave
first performances in the Soviet Union of works by such
seminal composers as Webern, Boulez, Stockhausen, Cage,
Penderecki, Ligeti, and Ives. He even created his own
festival, Alternativa, dedicated to the music of the
avant-garde, in 1988. During much of the 1970s and 80s,
ideological censorship restricted Alexei's public
performances to within the USSR; during this period he
created strong associations with such outstanding chamber
musicians as violinist Oleg Kagan and cellist Natalia
Gutman, as well as with the Philharmonic Orchestra, under
conductors Kyrill Kondrashin and Wassili Sinaiski.
In 1976, Alexei Lubimov's interests expanded to Baroque
music and historic instruments, manifest in his co-founding
of the Moscow Baroque Quartet - along with Tatiana Grindenko
on violin, Anatoly Grindenko on viola da gamba, and Oleg
Khudyakov on flute. By 1981, Mr. Lubimov was giving
performances on the fortepiano of the works of Mozart and
Haydn, the first of their kind in the Soviet Union. A few
years later, he presented the program, "The Golden Age of
Harpsichord Music 1650-1750" with his own Moscow Chamber
Academy, with works by German, French, Italian, and British
composers. He continues to be very active in the Early Music
world, performing in several festivals within Europe; he was
recently appointed to the faculty of the celebrated
Mozarteum in Salzburg.
Alexei Lubimov has numerous recordings since the 1970s, for
the Melodia (Russia), BIS, Sony, Erato, ECM and SoLyd
Records.
Reviews
"In familiar Liszt and Chopin, Lubimov offered more
imaginative faithfulness than I have heard in some time,
different in innumerable details from the "standard"
readings. But every time one thought, "Now, there's
something you couldn't do on a modern grand!" It was also
something that perhaps only Lubimov would have thought of
doing anyway. The sound never seemed miniaturized: the third
and fourth Chopin Ballades rose to glorious climaxes, and
the three members of the audience who left before the
encores missed a magnificent Barcarolle."
The
Financial Times (London)
"... [Q]uite a revelation...Lubimov brings a big,
modern technique to bear on these (Mozart) sonatas...K533's
marvelous first movement has lots of incredible, rich
counterpoint and tremendous harmonic twists which Lubimov
makes the most of...the slow movement, too, is really superb
where he builds up the phrases and sequences architecturally
with careful timing..."
BBC Radio 3
Radio Review (Stanley Sadie)
"Lubimov proved himself a flexible, inspired partner.
For him, selfless following obviously is no more fruitful
than aggressive leading. The versatile Muscovite did his own
Romantic singing at the keyboard - always warm and
sympathetic, virtuousic yet understated, assertive yet
poetic. Don't call him an accompanist."
Los Angeles
Times, 1995
(taken from The Classical Musical Archives web-site -
http://www.classicalarchives.com/artists/lubimov.html)
Track List:
1. Valentin Silvestrov. Sonata # 2 for piano (1975)
2. Vladimir Martynov. Autumn Song for harpsichord and tape (1978)
3. Viktor Suslin. Mitternachtsmusic (Midnight Music) for violin. ha
4. Pavel Karmanov. Different ... rains for flute, piano and tape (1
5. Galina Ustvolskaya. Concert for piano, string orchestra and timp
Suggested CDs:
written specially for and/or dedicated to him by Galina
Ustvolskaya, Pavel Karmanov, Victor Suslin, Valentin
Silvestrov and Vladimir Martynov.
From 1937 to 1939 Galina Ustvolskaya studied at
the Professional School of Music in Leningrad and from 1947
at the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory. Her composition
teachers were Georgy Rimsky-Korsakov (1957-1960) and Dimitri
Shostakovitch, who greatly admired her music and with whom
she apparently had a short affair. After her studies she
became a teacher for composition at the same conservatory
(1948-1977). Among her students were composers such as Boris
Tischchenko and Victor Kissin.
In 1966 she married Konstantin Makukhin. She has lived in
Saint Petersburg all of her life and still lives in her tiny
apartment in the Prospekt Gagarina. She lives like a hermit,
hardly getting out of her house and not in contact with
people. She doesn't give interviews and hates pictures being
taken.
Very few remarks of Ustvolskaya exist on her own music.
Famous ones are:
"My music is never chamber music, not even in the case of a
solo sonata".
"All who really love my music should refrain from
theoretical analysis of it..."
Ustvolskayas music sounds like nothing else. She is a very
original composer and it is hard to describe her music in
musical terms. The Dutch musicologist Elmer Schönberger
calls her The woman with the hammer while the Russian
composer Victor Suslin uses the term black hole, a galactic
constellation of such an enormous density, absorbing all
energy and light in it.
Many of her composition are extremely violent with dynamics
up to fffff. But on the other hand she always gives
instructions to perform her music espressivo, even with
dynamics like this and even if the sound comes from banging
a hammer on a wooden box (Composition No.2). The music is
rhythmic and many times even ritualistic. One could even
find traces of minimal music in her compositions. Some of
composition have religious subtitles, but she never was a
very religious woman in the usual sense of the word. For
her, religion is living together with nature, respecting
living creatures and even talking to birds and ants. Her
decision to live in seclusion is reflected in her music,
which also goes its own way.
In Russia it was very difficult for her to compose her 'own'
works. To please the government she wrote film scores and
patriotic music, filed in the Other Works section. In many
cases her serious works had to wait over 20 years for their
first performances.
The first time that her music was played outside of Russia
was probably in 1986 at the Wiener Festwochen, and later in
1988 at a festival in Heidelberg, Germany. Her breakthrough
in the west came around 1989 with concerts at the Holland
Festival in Amsterdam, and in 1992 the Festival of
Huddersfield. Ustvolskaya seldom visits concerts and has, as
far as I know, only been at one concert abroad (January 6,
1996 in Amsterdam, where Octet, Grand Duet, Piano Sonata
No.6 and Symphony No.2 were performed by the Royal
Concertgebouw Orchestra, Mstislav Rostropovitch, Reinbert de
Leeuw and Sergei Leiferkus).
(taken from
http://home.wanadoo.nl/eli.ichie/ustvolskaya.html)
Pavel Karmanov - a composer, and a member of
the Russian Composers Union. Graduated from Moscow
Conservatory in 1995. Pavel is famous primarily in the
musical world for his academic compositions and film scores,
such as "Gladiatrix" by Timur Bekmambetov, "Scarecrow"
(dir.A.Kott), "Closed Space" (dir.N.Egen), "Date"
(dir.A.Fenchenko).
His composition "Forellen Quintet" was the basis for a
documentary music film that we made for Greenpeace Russia.
Valentin Silvestrov was born in Kiev,
Ukraine, on September 30, 1937, arguably the darkest year in
the Russian history. He came rather late to music, beginning
study at 15, first privately and then at an evening music
school. By 1955, he graduated with a gold medal and enrolled
at the Kiev Institute of Construction Engineering; but three
years later Silvestrov began serious pursuit of music at the
Kiev Conservatory, studying with Lyatoshyns'ky and Revutsky.
Even with earliest works like the Piano Quintet (1961),
Silvestrov was already drawn to the dramatic potential in
contrasting strong tonality with strong atonality; in his
massive Third Symphony "Eskhatofoniya" (1966), this
preoccupation with polarities took the form of "cultural"
(strictly notated) sounds and "mysterious" (improvised)
ones. The place of magic and invocation - those elements
that always defy material, that arise only in the process
and afterwards - began to rest more firmly in Silvestrov's
works.
1971's gigantic Drama for piano trio - "virtually a clinical
study of an artistic crisis," Silvestrov's biographer writes
- was a breakthrough work. And it was beginning in 1973 that
Silvestrov embarked on his "metaphorical" or "allegorical"
style, strongly reminiscent of late-Romantic cliché, to
which he still adheres today - "metaphorical" because
Silvestrov knows these sounds to be irrefutably "past" and
has no interest in merely "resurrecting" them; and
"allegorical," because Silvestrov wishes to use this music
obliquely, as an estranged means rather than a predictable
end.
Silvestrov's Symphony No. 5 of 1982 is perhaps an ideal
symbol of this style: in its three-quarter-hour cycle of
nine slow movements, it "recycles" a whole world of banal,
almost kitschy melodies on its scarred, cloudy surface. But
underneath this floating music lies a tremendous complexity,
both technically and emotionally; the accumulative
expressive effect is undeniable and unexpected. Malcolm
MacDonald perhaps put it best when he wrote that the
"Russian sense of lamentation...reaches in Silvestrov a new
expressive stage: he seems to compose, not the lament
itself, but the lingering memory of it, the mood of sadness
that it leaves behind."
(taken from All-Music Guide web site)
Born in Moscow in 1946, Vladimir Martynov
studied the piano under M.Mezhlumov and composition under
N.Sidelnikov at the Moscow Conservatory, from which he
graduated in 1970-71. In his first large-scale works he
adopts the serial technique (Quartet, 1966 - Concerto for
oboe and for flute, 1968 - Hexagramme for piano, 1971 -
Sonata for violin and piano, 1973). In 1973 he began working
in the studio for electronic music of the Scriabin museum,
the meeting ground of many of the leading composers of the
Russian avante-garde, such as Denisov, Gubaidulina,
Schnittke, Nemtin and others. A rock-group, The Boomerang,
was formed in the studio with the active participation of
Martynov and for which he wrote the rock-opera The Seraphic
Visions of St.Francis of Assisi (1978). At the same time he
was exploring the possibilities of the minimalist system
simoultaneously with Arvo Part and Valentin Sylvestrov.
In additions, the extraordinary variety of his interests led
him to the study of folk music for which he travelled
extensively all over Russia, the Caucasus and Tadjikistan,
of theology, the history of religions and philosophy,
medieval Russian and Western music and religious musicology.
At the end of the 1970s he embarked on an investigation of
the early Russian religious chant, while also publishing
editions of works by Isaac, Machaut, Gabrieli, Dunstable and
Dufay. At this period he accepted a teaching post at the
Theological Institute of the Trinity-Saint Sergius. During
the period 1980-83 his output was mainly devoted to church
music. Then new works began to appear which combine the
experiments of former period, continuing his involvement
with minimalism (Opus post I, 1984, Opus post II for piano,
1996, Twelve Victories of King Arthur for seven pianos,
1990) and widening his explorations of the great religious
themes in works like Apocalypse (1991), Lamentations of
Jeremiah (1992), Magnificat (1993), Stabat Mater (1994),
Requiem (1998), Games of Humans and Angels (1999) and
Litanies to the Virgin (2000).
Alexei Lubimov was born in Moscow in 1944, and
began his musical training at the Central Music School in
1952. In 1963, he became a student at the Moscow
Conservatory, where he worked with Heinrich Neuhaus - the
celebrated teacher of such performers as Sviatolslav Richter
and Emil Gilels. While still a student at the Conservatory,
he won several prestigious competitions, including 1st Prize
at the International Piano Competition in Rio de Janeiro, in
1965. He also began performing in concert, such as at the
Warsaw Autumn Festival of Contemporary Music, in 1964.
Since his graduation from the Conservatory in 1968, Alexei
Lubimov has pursued an active career as a performer and has
recorded a wide array of music, an extensive sample of which
is provided here at the Classical Archives. From early in
his career, he has championed the works of modern composers,
and premiered numerous works of Soviet composers, such as
Schnittke, Demidov, Pärt, and Volkonsky; he also gave
first performances in the Soviet Union of works by such
seminal composers as Webern, Boulez, Stockhausen, Cage,
Penderecki, Ligeti, and Ives. He even created his own
festival, Alternativa, dedicated to the music of the
avant-garde, in 1988. During much of the 1970s and 80s,
ideological censorship restricted Alexei's public
performances to within the USSR; during this period he
created strong associations with such outstanding chamber
musicians as violinist Oleg Kagan and cellist Natalia
Gutman, as well as with the Philharmonic Orchestra, under
conductors Kyrill Kondrashin and Wassili Sinaiski.
In 1976, Alexei Lubimov's interests expanded to Baroque
music and historic instruments, manifest in his co-founding
of the Moscow Baroque Quartet - along with Tatiana Grindenko
on violin, Anatoly Grindenko on viola da gamba, and Oleg
Khudyakov on flute. By 1981, Mr. Lubimov was giving
performances on the fortepiano of the works of Mozart and
Haydn, the first of their kind in the Soviet Union. A few
years later, he presented the program, "The Golden Age of
Harpsichord Music 1650-1750" with his own Moscow Chamber
Academy, with works by German, French, Italian, and British
composers. He continues to be very active in the Early Music
world, performing in several festivals within Europe; he was
recently appointed to the faculty of the celebrated
Mozarteum in Salzburg.
Alexei Lubimov has numerous recordings since the 1970s, for
the Melodia (Russia), BIS, Sony, Erato, ECM and SoLyd
Records.
Reviews
"In familiar Liszt and Chopin, Lubimov offered more
imaginative faithfulness than I have heard in some time,
different in innumerable details from the "standard"
readings. But every time one thought, "Now, there's
something you couldn't do on a modern grand!" It was also
something that perhaps only Lubimov would have thought of
doing anyway. The sound never seemed miniaturized: the third
and fourth Chopin Ballades rose to glorious climaxes, and
the three members of the audience who left before the
encores missed a magnificent Barcarolle."
The
Financial Times (London)
"... [Q]uite a revelation...Lubimov brings a big,
modern technique to bear on these (Mozart) sonatas...K533's
marvelous first movement has lots of incredible, rich
counterpoint and tremendous harmonic twists which Lubimov
makes the most of...the slow movement, too, is really superb
where he builds up the phrases and sequences architecturally
with careful timing..."
BBC Radio 3
Radio Review (Stanley Sadie)
"Lubimov proved himself a flexible, inspired partner.
For him, selfless following obviously is no more fruitful
than aggressive leading. The versatile Muscovite did his own
Romantic singing at the keyboard - always warm and
sympathetic, virtuousic yet understated, assertive yet
poetic. Don't call him an accompanist."
Los Angeles
Times, 1995
(taken from The Classical Musical Archives web-site -
http://www.classicalarchives.com/artists/lubimov.html)
Track List:
1. Valentin Silvestrov. Sonata # 2 for piano (1975)
2. Vladimir Martynov. Autumn Song for harpsichord and tape (1978)
3. Viktor Suslin. Mitternachtsmusic (Midnight Music) for violin. ha
4. Pavel Karmanov. Different ... rains for flute, piano and tape (1
5. Galina Ustvolskaya. Concert for piano, string orchestra and timp
Suggested CDs:
- Vladimir Tarasov
- Biosintez
- Anatoly Vapirov with Sergei Kuriokhin
- TRI-O (Sergei Letov, Arkady Shilkloper...)
- Valery Grohovsky, Sergey Manoukian, Anton Revniouk
- Ensemble 4'33'' with Mina Agossi
- Vladimir Volkov, Sergei Kuriokhin, Keshavan Maslak
- Edison Denisov
- CLASSICAL: Contemporary
- FEATURING PIANO