05.03.2015

Composer Andrei Golovin speaking about his Bambi suite and more

What drew you to Bambi? Going by the list of your opuses you like serious plots, and yet here suddenly there’s a musical fairy-tale...
– It’s not a fairy-tale at all, it’s a story with a very serious and deep meaning. Look how the plot develops – a newly born deer enters a dangerous world. He grows up and makes friends. He encounters mankind’s brutality – his mother is shot by hunters. Then the character discovers love, he has children of his own, he meets his father – an old leader – and subsequently becomes a leader himself. And later a young deer appears who looks with admiration at Bambi as a leader – things have come full circle.
Bambi is a story about love, death, loss, the development of a species, the transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next – about the most important issues in human life. I don’t see Bambi as a story about animals. It’s just that the characters living their lives in this story happen to be deer.


Is it music for children or adults?
– Like any form of art, it has a lot of subtexts and everyone can find something in it for himself, including children.


How did Bambi come to be a ballet? What do you think of that?
– It’s a long story. The work was written in 1980, it’s exactly thirty-five years old. I was commissioned to write the work by Melodiya which at the time was releasing a series of records with musical fairy-tales. I began to write and composed a great deal of music – the fairy-tale was released on two records.
I showed this work to my colleagues and everyone said the music was brilliant and it would be a great shame for it to be lost. I was advised to come up with a suite, as normally happens. I took the advice – albeit not immediately but twelve years later. Interestingly, the suite has a good performance history. It has been performed three times in France, and they love it there. Once I conducted it in Rouen and very recently – in January 2014 – a production was staged based on the suite at the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional de Paris. Children acted out Salten’s tale, intermittently interspersed with purely musical pieces. It turned out to be a major two-hour production.
In Russia the music for Bambi has also been performed several times and I myself conducted on each occasion.
Regarding the ballet version, after writing the music I had one proposal to use it for a ballet production. Work even commenced, but for various reasons it didn’t work out. It’s very interesting to see what will happen now. The fact is that the suite is a sequence of brief pieces, each of which is an independent work. I’m very interested to see how it will look on-stage, that’s very intriguing for me.


So this is the only ballet staged to your music?
– Yes, that’s right. Music for theatre is always commissioned and somehow I never got commissions for ballets. But to be honest I don’t really love working on commission because I don’t compose so quickly.

When composing a work how important for you is the external influence – does it come from the plot or the idea? Or does the music emerge independently of all of that?
– It’s always the music to start with. I think that there has to be some narrative musical idea in any piece before that work can grow and develop.


Do you find it difficult to be a composer in the 21st century? You write traditional music using traditional methods. You have to be bold to do that today...
– If you are “called on” to be a composer it’s not difficult. It’s hard to speak for myself – let other’s do that. I don’t feel any discomfort and I just try not to write anything superfluous. Music is composed by a specific person and if he has his own ideas then that’s such a joy, but if he believes that everything has already been written and – like any banal postmodernist – digs up music from the past and distorts it then I find that repellent.


So the “burden of centuries” actually helps you?
– I don’t know how much it helps – after all, we can only learn from ourselves. Any form of art is an organism that develops of its own accord and composers as a rule are enveloped in themselves. And, at the same time, without classical music I can’t imagine life, I live through classical music.


Returning to Bambi, what would you like to say to younger audiences?
– You can recognise many of life’s values when you are still a child, but when you grow up they appear more distinctly. These values are love, friendship, faithfulness, mutual assistance and love of and devotion to your parents. All of this is present in the story of Bambi...
Speaking with Yekaterina Yusupova

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