New Music Festival, which took place during the “Book Arsenal” in Kyiv, closed with an extraordinary premiere. Kyiv audience got a change to hear the opera by the Ukrainian composer Sviatoslav Luniov The Bad-Tempered Songs.
Sviatoslav Luniov, undoubtedly holds a special place in composers community in Kyiv, with all its names and traditions: he is neither a leader, nor a rebel, but rather the curious traveler whose path lies outside the current range of the hierarchies. It is a difficult route, especially since the traveler does not simply choose the unbeaten paths, but also, in a sense, creates them together with the landscape.
Artistic work of Luniov is a holistic and yet unstoppable in its development system of cultural, artistic, and ethical values. Among other things, Luniov is the author of a monoopera The Bad-Tempered Songs on poems by Lewis Carroll from Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Given the current state of academic performance in Ukraine, chances for stage production of this piece for a long time were almost equal to zero.
That’s why the effort made by the concert agency “Ukho” to organize its premiere at the Mystetsky Arsenal is worth high praise. That night the National Chamber Ensemble “Kyiv Soloists” led by conductor Volodymyr Sirenko and soloist Nazgul Shukaeva performed on the stage of the festival.
Olha Harmash and Kateryna Libkind prepared simple and impressive stage design: in front of the stage there were ropes with paper silhouettes of children or even doll dresses floating on them, as if they were cut from giant books. The fancy dresses reflected the figure of the soloist, emphasizing the appearance of some new character or performance of a new party. At the end in a light epilogue one of these phantom dresses tied to a bunch of white balloons soared to the ceiling.
In general, The Bad-Tempered Songs are made up of 25 pieces (a shortened version was presented in the Arsenal). Vocal and orchestral numbers are separated by instrumental interludes. The composer used poems from both stories about Alice, and in one place – even scientific commentary on the famous poem Jabberwocky.
The opera does not have a single unifying plot. The numbers are linked by two powerful forces: brilliant absurdity by Carroll on the textual level and fine work of the composer on the musical level. The composer not only found the appropriate mood for each poem and character, but also built a complex internal architecture of the composition, put in it a great number of piercing motifs at different levels, stressed meaningful quotes and paradoxes, which could become a topic for a separate research article.
Bad-Tempered in the title is a sign of willful misconduct, alogism that is subjected to nonrandom and confident author’s will, takes the Songs outside the usual, linear language of art, everyday casual “physics” (by the way, experts of quantum physics still get inspired with Carroll’s metaphors): this story, among other things, is about foolish and irrational characters in metaphysical circumstances, no matter how improbable such connection may seem. Of course, the composer managed to create a musical equivalent of high-nonsense poetics through which Alice continues to charm both children and Nobel Prize winners.
We would like to thank the agency “Ukho” for that they not simply made the premiere possible, but also for that they presented Luniov’s opera to wide, non-academic audience. It’s a shame that some people in the audience were not adequately polite: some did not switch their cell phones off, others came with noisy and unruly child. However, despite the specific circumstances of the performance, one thing is certain that last Saturday (June 1) high-quality music was presented in Kyiv.
