The reflection of fabulousness in Igor Kovach’s musical theatre (on the example of the fairy-tale ballet “Bambi”)

Problem statement. Among Kharkiv composers, one of the significant places is occupied by Igor Kovach (1924–2003), a representative of the Kharkiv School of composers and Ukrainian musical culture of the 20th century. His works include music and stage, orchestra, concert, song, choral and literary-musical compositions, music for theatre performances, music for films and TV films. The creative legacy of Igor Kostyantynovych Kovach has a close connection with the children’s audience; it includes both instrumental music for young performers and theatrical music, where children from performers become listener, among them the fairy-tale ballets “The Northern Tale” and “Bambi”. The children’s music by I. K. Kovach did not receive proper consideration except for short newspaper essays and magazine notes, M. Bevz’s (2007) article devoted to children’s piano music. Thus, the problem of holistic study of children’s stage music by Igor Kovach still remains open. Objectives. The present article is devoted to the identification of musicalthematic, timbre-texture, genre-stylistic features, with the help of which the multifaceted figurative world of the ballet “Bambi” is embodied. The aim and the tasks of this research – to reveal the specifics of the figurative world of the fairytale ballet “Bambi” and to identify the musical means by which it is embodied. The role of the orchestra is established, the means of thematic characteristics of the characters are traced, and the peculiarities of the musical language stipulated by the requirements of the chosen genre are noted. Methodology. To achieve the aim we have used special scientific methods: genre, stylistic, intonation-dramaturgical and compositional ones. The presentation of the main material. The music for the fairy-tale ballet “Bambi” belongs to two authors: Igor Kovach and his son Yuri. The new features inherent in the sound palette are manifested in the instrumentation, where along with the usual composition of a modern symphony orchestra there are saxophones, rhythm- and bass-guitars, drums, which due to their timbres bring a sharp taste of emotional and behavioural looseness. Introducing the qualities of non-academic tradition into the academic orchestra, the authors, on the one hand, use them according to their origin, on the other – turn them into an organic part of the symphonic score. By making a “concession” to pop music, simplifying harmonious language, freeing it from the extreme manifestations of expanded tonality, bringing it closer, on the one hand, to classical-romantic, on the other – to jazz, Igor Kovach showed his inherent sense of modernity, “address quality” of creativity. Conclusions. Thus, the fabulous multifaceted world of “Bambi” is revealed in the ballet owing to the bright thinking and language of the composer. The action of the ballet takes place against the background of bright genre sketches, which are as if immersed in the very density of life. This impression arises due to the dynamics of rhythms, colourful orchestration, and a variety of styles, addressed to the sound world of today. Generalized intonations of academic art organically coexist with the turns of song quality of different origins, dance quality, march quality, jazz improvisations, which was facilitated by the co-authorship with Yuri Kovach.

Timbre-orchestra aspect of symphonic works by Boris Tchaikovsky

Boris Tchaikovsky is the author of bright and original symphonic compositions. A timbre-orchestra palette is, undoubtedly, one of the key components of the music language of his works. The authors of this research analyze Tchaikovsky’s  Violin concerto and Piano concerto, the symphonic poems “The Juvenile” and “The Winds of Siberia”, the Symphony No 3 “Sevastopol”, and the Symphony with Harp, in order to consider particular aspects connected with the timbre-orchestra language of his symphonic compositions, such as: the timbre-texture embodiment of thematic invention (the peculiarities of orchestra compositions); the ensemble combinations of instruments and their meaning. The authors also analyze the composer’s favorite timbre-texture techniques. The authors define and consider the phenomenon of “timbre pointillism” typical for the timbre writing of the composer. The original symphonic works by Tchaikovsky have been studied many times. In 2019 a research by Yu. Abdokov was published in which the author considers the peculiarities of an orchestra in Tchaikovsky’s theatrical music. The orchestra in his symphonic compositions also has theatrical features, however with some peculiarities. The features of Tchaikovsky’s timbre-orchestra writing haven’t been analyzed yet, and this fact determines the scientific novelty of the research. The authors attempt to generalize the peculiarities of the timbre writing of the composer. Tchaikovsky himself always emphasized the necessity of a single and final variant of orchestration.   

Scaramouche, Scaramouche: Sibelius on Stage

Sibelius’s only balletic pantomime, Scaramouche, composed in 1913, remains one of his least-known works, even though it is one of his longest dramatic scores and belongs to his period of compositional re-evaluation. This article explores the pantomime in the context of its first production, performed in 1922 in Denmark and 1924 in Sweden. It argues that the pantomime’s reception both illuminates the importance of dance as a formative ‘modern’ genre within the Nordic countries during this period, and demonstrates that the score is defined by stylistic plurality, which was key to its theatrical success. The article calls for increased musicological attention to Nordic theatrical music, a genre that was extremely popular among early twentieth-century Nordic composers. It provided musicians with musical spaces that were more liberating than the concert hall or the opera house for the purposes of cultivating their musical language.

‘May she who was once beautiful be transformed into a monster’: magic and witchcraft in Veneno es de amor la envidia (Madrid, 1711)

Through the lenses of magic, witchcraft and superstition, this article explores Veneno es de amor la envidia (Biblioteca Nacional de España, Ms. 19254), a little-known zarzuela by Sebastián Durón and Antonio de Zamora. I consider this zarzuela within its wider cultural context, looking at changing attitudes towards magic and witchcraft in early modern Spain, as well as within the context of Zamora’s literary output. I propose that Veneno es de amor la envidia was intended to attract large crowds of theatregoers fascinated with depictions of the supernatural while also helping to debunk beliefs in witchcraft through the use of humour and parody. An examination of this rather intriguing zarzuela contributes to our understanding of an often-overlooked corpus of theatrical music of the Baroque.

The Role of City Culture in the Formation of the Bashkir National Art of the Pre-Revolutionary Period

The article presents some basic information about the development of city musical culture in the Orenburg gubernia and in Ufa during the pre-revolutionary period. The regularity of the formation of the phenomenon of the city cultural milieu is traced by the examples of such components as concert and theatre practice, in the context of which the foundations of compositional and performance professionalism indispensable for the development of European genres were perfected. As the result of an overview of various forms of musicmaking at home and the concert and theater practice, the foundations of which had been installed by the direct bearers of European culture itself — Polish insurgents banished to the gubernia in the 18th century — the fact is substantiated that the Russian-European academic musical tradition conditioned the environment due to which national concert life was established in the early 20th century. It is proven that the Europeanization in Bashkir culture began not during the period of the Soviet cultural development, but on the wave of Jadidism in the activities of the new-method madrassahs, which in the beginning of the previous century became the main centers for sacred and secular culture. At the same time, the emergence of combined Tatar-Bashkir dramatic theatrical troupes conducive towards the onset of national theatrical music is the greatest accomplishment of Bashkir music in the prerevolutionary period, which connected the pre-revolutionary epoch with the period of formation of national compositional schools.

Musical Sources and Archives

This chapter examines the nature and uses of music in early Luso-Brazilian theater from the eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. The first part considers the processes and choices that determined the formation of a theatrical music repertory during the late colonial period. The second part describes the extant musical sources of theatrical music once performed in Portuguese America and now at libraries and archives in Portugal (Paço Ducal de Vila Viçosa, Biblioteca do Palácio da Ajuda) and Brazil (Acervo Curt Lange, Biblioteca da UFRJ, Museu da Música de Mariana), as well as those that have disappeared but can be identified through nonmusical sources. The chapter closes with a discussion ofthe first examples of sung-through Italian operas composed in Brazil.

БАГАТОВИМІРНІСТЬ ВТІЛЕНЬ СЮЖЕТУ ТУРАНДОТ В ЖАНРІ ТЕАТРАЛЬНОЇ МУЗИКИ

The article deals with the historical projection of the 300-year-old path of the Turandot image in the genre of theatrical music. After completing all the stages of European exoticism in Chinese subjects, Turandot was embodied in the main stages of the development of musical drama - from the baroque French Fair Theater Fory Saint-Lauren (Le Sage / d'Orneval for the first time analyzed music by J.C. Gillіer) through the pre-classical model of Italian folk (K. Gozzi) to the concept of German romanticism (F. Schiller ‒ F. Destush, K.M. Weber, W. Lyahner), oriental readings of the early modern days: neoclassical (F. Buzoni), symbolist (W. Ferst), primitive-naive (Y. Vakhtangov), psychologically-expressionistic (W. Stenhammar), household-entertaining variants (Broadway Theater) and complex multicomponent phenomena of the second half of the twentieth century, embodied in the "epic theater" (B. Brecht / H. D. Hosalla, Y. Lakner, A. Schnitke) and means "Theater of absurd" (W. Hilderschmayer), based on postmodernistic parameters of hybrid genre formations in Ukrainian culture (M. Denisenko, I. Uryvskiy) in the globalized reference of intercultural communication of the beginning of the third millennium.

The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare

This handbook presents a broad sampling of current historical scholarship on Shakespeare’s period that it is hoped will prove useful to scholars of his poems and plays. Rather than attempting to summarize the historical ‘background’ to Shakespeare, individual chapters explore numerous topics and methodologies at the forefront of current historical research. An initial cluster shows how political history has expanded beyond a traditional focus on relations between Crown and Parliament to encompass attention to attempts by the government to manage opinion; military challenges; problems in subduing Ireland and mediating relations between the British kingdoms; and the interplay between national affairs and local factions and concerns. Additional chapters deal with relationships between intellectual culture and political imagination, with detailed attention to varieties of early modern historical thought and the emergence of a ‘public sphere’. Other contributors examine facets of religious and social history, including scriptural translation, concepts of the devil, cultural attitudes concerning honour, shame and emotion, and life in London. A final section deals with vernacular architecture, Renaissance gardens, visual culture and theatrical music.