PERFORMERS:
Polina Osetinskaya
Anton Batagov
PROGRAMME:
Anton Batagov
Eternal Comeback from music to Ivan Dykhovichny’s film Kopeyka
Pérotin
Viderunt Omnes
Johann Sebastian Bach
Contrapunctus 7 from The Art of the Fugue, BWV 1080
Anton Batagov
Valse in D Minor from music to Johan August Strindberg’s play The Pelican
Johann Pachelbel
Ciacona in F Major
Philip Glass
Protest from Act II of the opera Satyagraha
Anton Batagov
Music for December from the eponymous film by Ivan Dykhovichny
Seven transcriptions for two pianos
Viderunt omnes fines terræ
salutare Dei nostri.
Jubilate Deo, omnis terra.
Notum fecit Dominus salutare suum;
ante conspectum gentium
revelavit justitiam suam.
All the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God.
Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth;
The Lord has made His salvation known
and revealed His righteousness to the nations.(Psalm 98: 3,4,2)
(lyrics used in Viderunt omnes by Pérotin)
Why seven? Definitely not just because the programme consists of seven pieces. The number seven is always invisibly present in our life, structuring it and enduing everything with some overhuman meaning. Even if we know nothing about the mystical meanings of this number, we still remember that Moscow, as we say in Russia, rests on the seven hills, there are seven Fridays in a week, and it is seven miles from the Earth to the sky, as the Russian sayings have it. A detailed account of why and where the number seven can be found in this music would have taken too long. But, believe me, it is there.
The entire programme does not include a single note that was originally written for a piano duo. All the pieces were created for other instruments and the transcriptions for two pianos have been made by me specially for this event. Transcription has been known in musical practice for centuries. In the past musicians took instrumentation mush easier than in the recent 200 years. For instance, it was quite common to take a part written for a certain instrument and to play it in with another instrument. Or, even more amusing: Johann Sebastian Bach liked a violin concerto by Vivaldi so much that he just added a left-hand part to it, thus creating the clavier concerto by Bach.
I have always found it a shame that the best music is not written for piano. So, just to repair this injustice, I once made several piano transcriptions and started playing them in my concerts. And then Polina Osetinskaya and I felt a mutual desire to perform together. But we could not decide what to play. Honestly, I had no wish at all to perform something of what is usually played by piano duos. Clearly, we needed some other, uncompromising decision. And so I realized that I need to take the music "about the most important things in life, as we say, no matter what instrument it was written for. Polina, like no other musician, is able to convey it in her playing. So the programme somehow developed by itself. There are seven pieces: music by Pérotin, Johann Sebastian Bach, Johann Pachelbel, Philip Glass and three pieces written by me. I have made a two-piano version of all these works. My impression is that this version of this music sounds expressive and self-sufficient. This is not, God forbid, "Liszt's version". What Liszt always wanted to do was to demonstrate the virtuoso possibilities of the piano, so in his transcriptions the original idea is usually lost in the machinegun fire passages. I, however, was trying not to interfere with the music, to let it be itself and just to plunge it into the space of the piano sound. It is when we cease to impose our own ideas on the instrument, that the piano sound is revealed in all its voluminous depth.
This entire programme is a journey through the centuries along with the music which, regardless of the time when it was created, shares one common state. You can call God by different names or use no name at all, but this state is always the same wherever you are: it is a meditative stay with the Truth. It means concentration on a single point, without distractions for anything else. There is no doubt that it is through this point that the vertical of Truth passes, giving meaning to all our horizontal being. It should be noted that the music used by people from time immemorial to convey this experience, has always been based on the endless repetition and variation of some simple motives and rhythmic pattern. The word "boring", however, is not applicable to this kind of music because it is not meant to merely reflect the surface emotions. In the second half of the twentieth century, someone invented the term "minimalism", and this strange sounding term came to be used to describe the style of some contemporary composers. Although, in fact, we can hardly imagine how many thousands of years ago this "minimalism” appeared.
It does not matter, therefore, what century the pieces included in this programme were written in. There is no old or new music. Just as there is no old or new prayer or love.
Anton Batagov
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