Do you ever listen to classical music by post-Soviet composers? Do you want to listen to Viktor Kissine? I think he's good.
For the ease of understanding the following, please know that I know almost nothing about contemporary classical music. What follows is my experience and impressions.
This past month I went to the San Francisco Symphony (on a date!) to hear Kissine's Aftersight and Beethoven's Second Symphony, Hans Graf conducting and Alexander Barantschik on violin. I didn't have much expectation from the Kissine piece, except a certain feeling that much modern classical music is too dissonant for me to enjoy comfortably. But from the start of the piece I was mesmerized. The dissonance was enough to keep me in total suspense through the entire piece (which I'd estimate was somewhere between half to three quarters of an hour long, judging from the length of the whole program, but I had no way of judging that at the time), but there was enough, er, how can I say it—sweetness? to make it thoroughly enjoyable for me.
It's a piece for chamber orchestra and violin. Notably, really excellent use was made of the harp—I used to play a little and I've never heard anyone make a harp sound like that. It was eerie. The pianist moved back and forth between the celesta and the harpsichord. The piece was atonal but it didn't sound chaotic, it sounded spare and open. While there was a lot of percussion involved nothing about the piece felt crashing—it had a quality of natural tension that a crash or two might have resolved, to my relief and the overall detriment of the experience. Silence, space, and absence were used to a really good effect in this piece as well.
I wish I could hear it again, but it hasn't been recorded yet. I'll be on the edge of my seat waiting for a recording to be released, just as I was during the piece. I haven't even found the album mentioned in the program notes, Victor Kissine: Chamber Music.
Speaking of program notes, here they are:
Kissine stands in the tradition of Russian expressionism that evolved out of Dmitri Shostakovich by way of such figures as Alfred Schnittke, Galina Ustvolskaya, and Sofia Gubaidulina. His music often displays an edgy, quivering quality such as we hear at the opening of Aftersight, and it derives important aspects of its character from minute details of sound such as trills, glissandi, and insistent arpeggios. At heart his music seems infused by a cool objectivity born of ultra-precise notation—a meticulously defined text from which an interpreter may build. One might call Kissine a hyper-refined composer; his music often makes its points through minuscule gestures, quiet utterances, and motifs deconstructed into evanescence—indeed, into silence itself. The musicologist Frans C. Lemaire, a specialist in the music of “the Soviet demise,” adds further names to the list of former-Soviet-bloc composers who, in their diverse ways, bear aesthetic kinship to Kissine, including the Russian Alexander Knaifel, the Georgian Giya Kancheli, the Ukrainian Valentin Silvestrov, and the Hungarians György Ligeti and György Kurtág, “all of them composers who give us a music of introversion, representatives of a fin de siècle which, after the failure of political and religious ideologies, can no longer find truth save in a process of interrogation, with the weight of silence giving back the only possible response.” |
