< back to Calendar >
Illuminations
Festival Concert 2
August 12, 2022
Friday
7:30 pm – Festival Concert
Lincoln Theater
Masks are required to be worn at all times during the concert. While we strongly recommend everyone be vaccinated, proof of vaccination is no longer required to attend.
Tickets available in advance or at the door.
Please note: All ticket sales are nonexchangeable and nonrefundable.
PROGRAM
Kinan Azmeh and Kevork Mourad Home Within
Kinan Azmeh, clarinet; Kevork Mourad, live illustrations and visuals
Sergei Rachmaninoff Trio élégiaque No. 2 in D Minor, Op. 9
Sean Lee, violin; Yeesun Kim, cello; Ignat Solzhenitsyn, piano
Artists
Sean Lee, violin
Yeesun Kim, cello
Ignat Solzhenitsyn, piano
Kinan Azmeh, clarinet
Kevork Mourad, live illustrations and visuals
Please note: All ticket sales are nonexchangeable and nonrefundable.
Program Notes
by Mark Mandarano
Musical expression is in almost every case bound up with a sense of place, whether it is a place of origin, a specific time and tradition, or even an imaginary, fictitious creation. Upon examination, this notion is quickly complexified by numerous conflicting and somewhat contradictory factors. One thinks of Rachmaninoff, naturally, as a quintessentially Russian composer of central importance, whose music retained its distinctive national expression throughout his composing career, which began in earnest in the 1890s. However, when one considers that to the world of the 20th Century when most of that career occurred, Russian music was also identified with the brash modernism of Stravinsky, the Soviet-endorsed professionalism of Khrennikov, the surreptitious messages on behalf of the people by Shostakovich, the question quickly becomes: What, in the end, truly is Russian?
Despite the fact that, for his approaching 70th birthday, a message was sent to Rachmaninoff from the Union of Soviet Composers that conveyed “cordial greetings to you, renowned master of Russian musical art, glorious continuer of the great traditions of Glinka and Tchaikovsky, creator of works that are dear and close to the hearts of the Russian people” (a document signed by Glière, Myaskovsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Khachaturian, Kabalevsky, Khrennikov and others), for Rachmaninoff, the Bolshevik revolution meant the confiscation of his family property as he fled to the West on an open sled loaded with his wife and children. He remained an exile from what, during Soviet times, passed as the Russian way of life.
It becomes clear that there is an essential national character that transcends the frequently misguided political clashes, an idea that is thrown into even more dramatic relief during the current European catastrophe, when a tyrant and his cabal act independently of the will and interests of their people. Furthermore, as a composer during the first half of the 20th Century, Rachmaninoff rejected many of the central tenets of what it meant to be modern or contemporary (i.e., Schoenberg)––or as some critics would have it, “relevant”:
“I have no sympathy with the composer who produces works according to preconceived formulas or preconceived theories, or with the composer who writes in a certain style because it is the fashion to do so. Great music has never been produced in that way—and I dare say it never will….A composer’s music should express the country of his birth, his love affairs, his religion, the books which have influenced him, the pictures he loves. It should be the product of the sum total of a composer’s experience.”
Thus, Rachmaninoff’s work, especially this early Trio, can be seen as making a claim to not only a Russian identity, but a certain kind of Russian identity, from a certain time (pre-Soviet, pre-modern) through a certain style and language, a musical language that was codified by 1900, but which still retained expressive potential beyond that date in the hands of a master composer and performer. In this way, Rachmaninoff highlighted divisions within his homeland which became a subtext for his musical persona for the remainder of his life. Similarly, the musician Kinan Azmeh highlights the divisions within his homeland of Syria. A country with a history stretching back thousands of years, terms from which persist even in today’s parlance (as in the cliché of the conversion on the road to Damascus), modern Syria is the site of divisions stoked and prolonged by external forces. Home Within serves as a lament and a meditation on loss and the complex meaning of a homeland.
Sergei Rachmaninoff was born in 1873 and was in his late teens when he made the acquaintance of the preeminent composer of his time, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, who was then about 50. Rachmaninoff impressed the elder composer as a brilliant pianist and as a composer who was already accomplishing much at a young age. Tchaikovsky even went on to disparage his own achievements while praising his younger colleague, saying, “It’s amazing how many things Serezha has managed to write this summer! A symphonic poem, a concerto, a suite, etc etc! All I've managed to write is just this one symphony [the Sixth]!” It was through the efforts of Tchaikovsky that Rachmaninoff’s opera Aleko was given its premiere at the Bolshoi Theater. Tchaikovsky even went so far as to suggest that this one-act opera should be paired with his own Iolanta to create a Russian counterpart to the ubiquitous Italian duo of Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci. With Tchaikosvky’s sudden death in 1893, there remained a void in the leadership of Russian music. As the new century unfolded and a dramatic bifurcation between public taste and critical values emerged, Rachmaninoff, who adhered to a “retrogressive” compositional style inherited to a great degree from his mentor Tchaikovsky, became one of the greatest celebrities of his age.
Immediately upon Tchaikovsky’s death, Rachmaninoff paid homage to his memory in the form of a grand Piano Trio in D minor, which is what Tchaikovsky had done years before upon the death of his mentor Nikolai Rubinstein. The work is on a massive, epic scale. With the first and second movements each lasting 20 minutes, the work strives, through duration, development, and elaboration, for an eternal greatness to match the stature of its dedicatee. The first movement is a dark, daring expression of the devastation of loss as only a Russian composer could manage it, with profound depth of feeling, a grief that risks falling into stasis, but never crosses the line into overindulgence. The second movement begins with an extensive meditative, lyrical hymn for piano alone, followed by what Rachmaninoff dubs “quasi” variations, starting with more impassioned music for the strings. The energy eventually transforms itself into the scurrying restlessness of a scherzo before resuming the more lyrical tone. In the finale, the music rouses itself to the pitch of an agonized threnody and exorcises its loss through extended cries that eventually become spent and return to the dark opening gestures, clearly marking a loss that can be proclaimed, but never fully overcome.
A 60-minute audio-visual performance, Home Within is a project of Syrian composer and clarinetist, Kinan Azmeh, and Syrian-Armenian visual artist, Kevork Mourad. In this work, art and music develop in counterpoint to each other, creating an impressionistic reflection on the Syrian civil war and its aftermath. Rather than following a narrative, the artists document specific moments in Syria’s recent history and reach into their emotional content in a semi-abstract way. The cornerstone of the project was the single sound-image piece, a sad morning, every morning released in March 2012.
By Mark Mandarano