Marginalia quasi una Fantasia: on the Second Violin Sonata by Alfred Schnittke

Tempo ◽  
2002 ◽  
pp. 2-10
Author(s):  
Dmitri Smirnov

The Second Violin Sonata for violin and piano (1968), subtided Quasi una Sonata, is one of Alfred Schnittke's most popular works, and it is one of my personal favourites among his pieces (alongside his First Symphony, First String Quartet, First Hymn, Second and Third Violin Concerti, Three Madrigals, etc). I discovered Schnittke's music in April 1969 at an underground concert given in the Gnessin Institute in Moscow by Alexei Lyubimov (piano), Boris Berman (piano), Lev Mikhailov (clarinet) and a few string players. This half-forbidden concert, organized by Alexander Ivashkin, was all that remained of a whole festival, which had been cancelled at the last moment by the authorities. The concert was split into three parts, the first two of them dedicated to the music of the Soviet avant-garde, with compositions by the likes of Edison Denisov, Tigran Mansurian, Valentin Silvestrov, Viktor Ekimovsky and Kuldar Sink etc. At the end of the second part there was a perfonnance of Schnittke's Serenade for five musicians. This very cheerful and fanny piece, entangled with hundreds of short quotations, sounded very different from the rest of the program. The final part of the concert contained works of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, played for the first time in Brezhnev's Soviet Union.

Author(s):  
Sam Brewitt-Taylor

Like all transformative revolutions, Britain’s Sixties was an episode of highly influential myth-making. This book delves behind the mythology of inexorable ‘secularization’ to recover, for the first time, the cultural origins of Britain’s moral revolution. In a radical departure from conventional teleologies, it argues that British secularity is a specific cultural invention of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which was introduced most influentially by radical utopian Christians during this most desperate episode of the Cold War. In the 1950s, Britain’s predominantly Christian moral culture had marginalized ‘secular’ moral arguments by arguing that they created societies like the Soviet Union; but the rapid acceptance of ‘secularization’ teleologies in the early 1960s abruptly normalized ‘secular’ attitudes and behaviours, thus prompting the slow social revolution that unfolded during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. By tracing the evolving thought of radical Anglicans—uniquely positioned in the late 1950s and early 1960s as simultaneously moral radicals and authoritative moral insiders—this book reveals crucial and unexpected intellectual links between radical Christianity and the wider invention of Britain’s new secular morality, in areas as diverse as globalism, anti-authoritarianism, sexual liberation, and revolutionary egalitarianism. From the mid-1960s, British secularity began to be developed by a much wider range of groups, and radical Anglicans faded into the cultural background. Yet by disseminating the deeply ideological metanarrative of ‘secularization’ in the early 1960s, and by influentially discussing its implications, they had made crucial contributions to the nature and existence of Britain’s secular revolution.


Author(s):  
William C. Brumfield

This article examines the development of retrospective styles in Soviet architecture during the Stalin era, from the 1930s to the early 1950s. This highly visible manifestation of communist visual culture is usually interpreted as a reaction to the austere modernism of 1920s Soviet avant-garde architecture represented by the constructivist movement. The project locates the origins of Stalin-era proclamatory, retrospective style in prerevolutionary neoclassical revival architecture. Although functioning in a capitalist market, that neoclassical reaction was supported by prominent critics who were suspicious of Russia’s nascent bourgeoisie and felt that neoclassical or neo-Renaissance architecture could echo the glory of imperial Russia. These critics left Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, but prominent architects of the neoclassicist revival remained in the Soviet Union. Together with the Academy of Architecture (founded 1933), these architects played a critical role in reviving classicist monumentalism—designated “socialist realism”—as the proclamatory style for the centralized, neoimperial statist system of the Stalin era. Despite different ideological contexts (prerevolutionary and Stalinist), retrospective styles were promulgated as models for significant architectural projects. The article concludes with comments on the post-Stalinist—and post-Soviet—alternation of modernist and retrospective architectural styles.


2002 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 261-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Michael Martinez

In the wake of India's May 1998 decision to resume nuclear testing for the first time since 1974, as well as arch-rival Pakistan's subsequent response, the attention of the world again has focused on nuclear nonproliferation policy as a means of maintaining stability in politically troubled regions of the world. The 1990s proved to be an uncertain time for nonproliferation policy. Pakistan acquired nuclear capabilities. Iraq displayed its well-known intransigence by refusing to allow International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) arms inspectors access to facilities suspected of manufacturing nuclear weapons. North Korea maintained a nuclear weapons program despite opposition from many Western nations. Troubling questions about nuclear holdings persisted in Argentina, Brazil, and South Africa. New nuclear powers were created in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Even the renewal of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in 1995 failed to assuage the concerns of Western powers fearful of aggressive measures undertaken by rogue nuclear proliferants.


Notes ◽  
1969 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 356
Author(s):  
Thomas Warburton ◽  
Samuel Adler

Experiment ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 297-316
Author(s):  
Lorin Johnson ◽  
Donald Bradburn

In the 1970s and 1980s, Los Angeles audiences saw Soviet defectors Mikhail Baryshnikov, Alexander Godunov, Natalia Makarova, and Rudolf Nureyev in the prime of their careers at the Hollywood Bowl, The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and the Greek Theater. Dance photographer Donald Dale Bradburn, a local Southern California dancer describes his behind-the-scenes access to these dancers in this interview. Perfectly positioned as Dance Magazine’s Southern California correspondent, Bradburn offers a candid appraisal of the Southern California appeal for such high-power Russian artists as well as their impact on the arts of Los Angeles. An intimate view of Russian dancers practicing their craft on Los Angeles stages, Bradburn’s interview is illustrated by fourteen of his photographs, published for the first time in this issue of Experiment.


2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 329-343
Author(s):  
Liudmyla Shapovalova ◽  
Іryna Romaniuk ◽  
Marianna Chernyavska ◽  
Svitlana Shchelkanova

"In the article under consideration are the ways of symphony genre transformation in the early works of Valentin Silvestrov (Ukraine). For the first time, the First, Second, Third, and Fourth symphonies by the genius composers of the 20th century are analyzed as a certain stylistic system. These compositions are endowed with the features of avant-garde poetics, and as a subject of musicological reflection, they are associated with a rethinking of the semantic paradigm of the genre. V. Silvestrov's early symphonies stand out from the classical practice of European symphonies. Scientific awareness of their phenomenal nature necessitated a methodological choice aimed at the most accurate identification of the philosophical concept of the new sound universum of V. Silvestrov's music. Deep correlation of the image of a human being as a factor of the symphony poetics (the influence of philosophical concepts of human ontology in the 20th century with the transformation of the genre canon) is considered. This refers to the nonmusical dimension of the genre semantics. The study of V. Silvestrov's early symphonies reveal a new philosophy of music through gradual movement – modulation: from the neo-baroque First Symphony and ""cosmic pastorals"" Musica Mundana of the Second Symphony through the history anthropologisation in the Third Symphony ""Eschatology"" to the monodrama Musica Humana in the Fourth Symphony. The dichotomy of Musica Mundana – Musica Humana is not accidental: in V. Silvestrov's creative method, remains relevant, which is confirmed by the dramaturgy of his latest work – the Ninth symphony (2019). Keywords: V. Silvestrov's early symphonies, evolution of style, worldview, Musica Mundana, monodrama. "


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-102
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Gąsiorowska

Abstract The paper is an attempt at a synthetic presentation of the Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz’s (1909–1969) musical output and artistic career, presented against the background of events in her personal life, and of major events in Polish and European history in the first seven decades of the 20th century. Bacewicz was called ‘the Polish Sappho’ already in the years between World Wars I and II, when there were very few women-composers capable of creating works comparable to the most eminent achievements of male composers. Her path to success in composition and as a concert soloist leads from lessons with her father, the Lithuanian Vincas Bacevičius, to studies at the Łódź and Warsaw Conservatories (violin with Józef Jarzębski, composition with Kazimierz Sikorski), and later with Nadia Boulanger at the École Normale de la Musique, as well as violin lessons with André Tourret. Her oeuvre has for many years been linked with neoclassicism, and folkloric inspirations are evident in many of her works. Her crowning achievement in the neoclassical style is the Concerto for String Orchestra of 1948, while influences from folklore can distinctly be heard in many concert pieces and small forms. The breakthrough came around 1958, under the influence of avant-garde trends present in West European music, which came to be adapted in Poland thanks to the political transformations and the rejection of socialist realism. In such pieces as Music for Strings, Trumpets and Percussion of 1958, Bacewicz transforms her previously fundamental musical components (melody, rhythm, harmony) into a qualitatively new type of sound structures, mainly focused on the coloristic aspects. Grażyna Bacewicz also applied the twelve-note technique, albeit to a limited extent, as in String Quartet No. 6 (1960). Her last work was the unfinished ballet Desire to a libretto by Mieczysław Bibrowski after Pablo Picasso’s play Le désir attrapé par la queue.


Author(s):  
Yu.P. Shchukina

Background. Today, analyzing the Ukrainian theatrical movement of the first half of XX century, we can’t bypass V. Morskoy’s critical legacy. Volodimir Saveliyovich Morskoy (the real name – Vulf Mordkovich) is one of the providing Ukrainian theatrical and film critics of the first half of the XX century. He left us his always argumentative, but sometimes contradictious evaluations of dramatic art masters: the directors of Kharkiv Ukrainian drama theatre “Berezil” (from 1935 it named after T. Shevchenko) L. Kurbas, B. Tyagno, L. Dubovik, Yu. Bortnik, V. Inkizhinov, M. Krushelnitsky, M. Osherovsky; the producers of Kharkiv Russian drama theatre named after A. Pushkin – O. Kramov, V. Aristov, V. Nelli-Vlad and many others. Due to the critic’s persecution by the repressive machine of USSR, his evaluations of theatrical process were not quoted in soviet time researches. They still were not entered to the professional usage, were not published and commented in the whole capacity. Methods and novelty of the research. The research methodology joints the historical, typological, comparative, textual, biographical methods. The first researcher, who made up incomplete description of the bibliography of dramatic criticism by V. Morskoy, became Kharkiv’s bibliographer Tetyana Bakhmet. She gave maximally full list of critic articles (more than eighty positions) for the 1924, 1926–1929, 1937, 1948–1949 years. Kharkiv’s theater scientist Ya. Partola [16] in the first encyclopedic edition, that contains the article about V. Morskiy, gave the description of the only publication by critic known for today, in Moscow newspaper “Izvestiya”. Forty six critical articles, half of which didn’t note in bibliographies of both scientists, were collected and analyzed in periodical funds of Kharkiv V. Korolenko Central Scientific Library by the author of this article. Objectives. V. Morskoy was writing the reviews about the new films; the programs of popular and philharmonic performers; was researching the musical theater. This article has the purpose to characterize the features of V. Morskoy’ critical reviews on the dramatic theater performances. Results. It was managed to find out the articles by V. Morskoy hidden for the cryptonym “Vl. M.”, which dedicated to the performances of the “Berezil” theater of the second half of 1920th: “Jacquery”, “Yoot”, “Sedi“. The critic wrote about the setting “Jacquery ” by director V. Tyahno : “Berezil in setting of ‘Jacquery’ emphases it’s ideology, approaching ‘Jacquery’ to nowadays viewer” [2]. Perceiving critically some objective features of avant-garde stylistic, such as cinema techniques, V. Morskoy remarks: “The pictures are discrete, too short, some of them are lasting for 2–3 minutes, they made cinematographically” [2]. In the same time, the young critic already demonstrates the feeling and flair to the understanding of acting art. So, he accurately pointed out the first magnitude actors from the “Berezil” ensemble: A. Buchma, Yo. Ghirnyak, M. Krushelnitsky, B. Balaban [2]. V. Morskoy connected his view to “Jacquery” with the tendency of the second half of the 1920th: “For recently the left theaters became notably more right, and the right one – more left”[2], that reveals his theatrical experience. His contemporaries due to the author’s sense of humor easily recognized the style of V. Morsky’s reviews. Critical irony passes through the his essay about the setting by director V. Sukhodolskiy “Ustim Karmelyuk” in the Working Youth Theatre: “Focusing attention to Karmelyuk, V. Sukhodolskiy left the peoples in shade. Often they keep silence – and not in the Pushkin sense “[14]. Despite on the “alive” style, one of the features of V. Morskoy journalism was adherence to principles. His human courage deserves a high evaluation. In 1940, after the three years after the exile of Les Kurbas, the leader director of “Berezil” Theater, to Solovki, the critic published in the professional magazine the creative portrait of this disgraced director’s wife – the actress Valentina Chistyakova [15]. V. Morskoy arguments on the relationship between the modern works and the tradition of prominent predecessors has always been ably dissolved in an analysis of a performance. Each time V. Morskoy was paying attention to the distinctions of principals of playwriting, stage direction and even creative schools, in the second half of 1930th – 1940th, when the words “stage direction”, “currents”, in condition of predomination the so-called “social realism” method, in the soviet newspapers practically were not mentioning. For example, the critic saw of realistically-psychological directions in the O. Kramov’s performance “Year 1919”[9]. In 1940, V. Morskoy made a review of the performance of the then Zaporizhhya theater named after M. Zankovetska “In the steppes of Ukraine”, insisting on the continuity of the comedies of O. Korniychuk in relation to the works of Gogol and others of playwrights-coryphaeuses: “The play of O. Korniychuk is characterized by profound national form...” [7]. However, in the fact that in the Soviet Union at that time reigned as the doctrine the methodology of the “socialist realism”, the tragedy of honest criticism comprised. In controversy with the critic O. Harkivianin, V. Morskoy expressed the credo about the ethics and fighting qualities of the reviewer: “Apparently, Ol. Kharkivianin belongs to the category of peoples, who see the task of critic in order to give only the positive assessments. The vulgar sociological approach to the phenomena of art could be remaining the personal mistake of Ol. Kharkivianin. But when he presents him as the most important argument, everyone becomes uncomfortable”[8]. In 1949, the political regime fabricated the case of a “bourgeois cosmopolitan” against the honest theatrical critic and accused him in betraying of public interests adjudged V. Morskoy to untimed death at a concentration camp (Ivdellag, 1952). However, the time arbitrated this long discussion in favor of V. Morskoy. Conclusions. For the objective analysis of theater life of the city and the country as a whole, it is imperative to draw from the historical facts contained in the reviews of V. Morskoy, and the methodology of the review while investigating studies of theatrical art and theatrical thought of 1920–1940th. Thus, the gathering of the full kit of the critical observations of the famous Kharkov theater expert of the first half of the XX century is the important task for further researchers.


Nordlit ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 293
Author(s):  
Piotr Bernatowicz

Mieczysław Porębski, a distinguished Polish art historian of the 20th century, once expressed the demand for Polish art history to be researched simultaneously with foreign studies - as parallel fields. "We entered the research field of the old masters' art as partners in, so to say, a ‘furnished household', whereas in the field of contemporary art we are co-explorers, exploring a ‘virgin land'", as Porębski put it. The book by professor Piotr Piotrowski Awangarda w cieniu Jałty. Sztuka w Europie środkowo-wschodniej w latach 1945-89 (The Avant-Garde in the Shadow of Yalta. The Art in East-Central Europe, 1945-1989) fully accomplishes this demanding postulate which nowadays seems to be rather rarely remembered by Polish art historians. The explored area, the East-Central European countries, which emerged, as a result of the Yalta Conference, between the iron curtain and the border of The Soviet Union (including former Yugoslavia) appears at least as an ‘old maiden' land, where scientific penetration still seems to be necessary.


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