Part I
Olga Bochikhina. Nevsky Prospekt (Symphony prologue)
Vladimir Tarnopolsky. Foucault's pendulum
Part II
Boris Tishchenko. Requiem
Soprano – Irina Vasilieva
Tenor – Alexander Timchenko
Part I. Requiem. I. Not Under Foreign Skies Protected. 2. Mountains Fall Before this Sorrow. 3. At Dawn They Came and Took you Away. 4. When Only the Dead Could Smile. 5. Quietly Flows the Quiet Don. 6. No, it is not I...
Part II. Stabat Mater. 7. If Only you Could Have Seen, Scoffing Girl. 8. For Seventeen Months I Have Cried Aloud. 9. The Weeks Fly Lightly By. 10. To Death. 11. The Sentence. 12. Crucifixion. 13. Already Madness Lifts its Wing...
Part III. In Memoriam. 14. I Have Learned How Faces Fall (Epilogue). 15. The Time has Come to Remember the Dead (Epilogue)
Amen ("And if Sometime in this Country...")
Boris Tishchenko's Requiem - to the words of Anna Akhmatova's poetic cycle of the same name - is one of his mightiest creations. It was a creative feat for the composer, just as the writing of the celebrated cycle of poems had been for Akhmatova.
Tishchenko met Anna Akhmatova in 1962, and in 1966, without any hope of ever hearing the work played, he wrote his Requiemto the words of the great poetess. The work had to wait 23 years for its first performance, which took place in the Great Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonia on 23 June 1989 on an evening dedicated to the centenary of Anna Akhmatova's birth.
Boris Tishchenko's composition belongs to the genre of so-called free Requiems, which follow the spirit of the Requiem but not its form. It does not have the customary titles of the parts of the Catholic mass for the dead, nor the customary and expected choir: only two soloists - soprano and tenor - are there to counter the orchestra. Despite its apparent monumental character, Tishchenko's opus is essentially a chamber work. The vast triple orchestra with piano, celeste and a mass of percussion instruments is treated as one huge ensemble. The composer skilfully uses the orchestral range: the lines, dots and brushstrokes of the orchestral timbres create an expressive, colourful picture that acts as a background for the pulsation of the poetry. At some points the orchestra falls silent completely: for example, in the expressive a capella duet "Quietly Flows the Quiet Don". And in the final "Amen" only the strings remain - their warm, living timbre being closest to the human voice. The strings sound like a large choir accompanying the last words of the soloists. In his setting of the poetic text Boris Tishchenko fully observes the order of the sections in Akhmatova's cycle, only occasionally changing the order of the chapters.
Yegor Kovalevsky
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