PROGRAMME:
Boris Tishchenko
Three Songs to Verses by Marina Tsvetaeva, vocal cycle for mezzo-soprano and piano
Performed by Daria Batova (mezzo-soprano) and Alexei Vasiliev (piano)
Sad Songs, vocal cycle for soprano and piano
Performed by Anastasia Perminova (soprano) and Alexei Logunov (piano)
Piano Sonata No 4
Performed by Nadezhda Kiprusheva
Verse by Shelley, set to music by Boris Tishchenko (1939–2010), is not by chance the source of the title of this concert programme marking seventy-five years since the composer’s birth. The impetuous and unstoppable flow of time found a highly diverse response in Tishchenko’s art. It is also a glance through the centuries of Russian history – the ballet Yaroslavna based on The Tale of Igor’s Campaign and the symphonic series after Dante’s La commedia divina. There are, too, symphonies that are a reflection of our own stormy age (an epigraph to them could be the words of one of the composer’s favourite poets, Alexander Kushner: “Times do not choose”), and the song cycle The Flight of Time by Anna Akhmatova...
The young Boris Tishchenko (in 1962 he was twenty-three) wrote the song cycle Sad Songs. In one notebook the composer united the verse of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mikhail Lermontov, his friend and contemporary Iosif Brodsky, the medieval Japanese poet Ōtomo no Yakamochi, the Turkish poet Melik Djevdet Andai and the great Hungarian poet Sándor Petőfi, as well as folkloric texts – an ancient warning fairy-tale called On the Tonsure of the Unloved... And even then, at the outset of his creative career, Tishchenko understood the unmistakable sense of stylistic temporal symbolism in his choice of poetic texts, as well as their embodiment in music. One vivid example is Christmas Romance, which the composer prefaced with the remark “Lyrics and refrain by Iosif Brodsky”. Tishchenko precisely and exactly reproduced the style of the narrator-singer of poets’ own verse in a circle of friends, adding only regular harmonic accompaniment.
When, decades later, we heard Three Songs to Poetry by Marina Tsvetaeva it was impossible not to admire the mature skills of the composer, who gently immersed audiences into an atmosphere of intimate and homely music-making. The “guitar” accompaniment to the piano conveyed some special confidentiality to the sad intonations of the singer’s voice, and – at times – the poet’s verse seemed “everyday” and yet, at the same time, aloof and otherworldly. Looking at the sheet music we see the composer’s remark next to the piano part “quasi Gitarre” (resembling the guitar), and from speaking with him we know that the cycle was initially composed for a singer and guitar (apropos, in this version the work is performed incredibly rarely). In Boris Tishchenko’s music Marina Tsetaeva’s confessional and loving lyricism takes on new life.
The same year (1972), when the Tsvetaeva songs were performed for the first time, Boris Tishchenko gave the first performance of his Fourth Sonata at the House of Composers. The composer dedicated his sonata to his “beloved Prague”, where he had been awarded the prize for best composition (Cello Concerto No 1) at the composers’ competition. Unlike the Third and Fifth Sonatas, which are framed with tragic hues, the Fourth Sonata is filled with energy and a sunny love of life. The resilient and graphically refined melody of the first movement undergoes a transformation from a peaceful monody at the start to a powerful and polyphonically structured culmination before again returning to the initial peaceful mood. The second movement – the lyrical heart of the sonata – in Tishchenko’s own words is a declaration of love for the city that enchanted him with its architecture, its colourful and sharp-tiled roofs and spires. The finale of the sonata is infectious with its rhythmic dazzle, energy and bright tread of the jazzy “rambling bass.”
Iosif Raiskin
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