The Kyiv House of Scholars hosted a most interesting concert by the Ricochet Ensemble of new music (conductor Ihor Nazarenko, artistic director Serhiy Piliutykov) called Time and Perception as part of the Thirteenth Musical Premiers of the Season International Festival.
Such conceptual actions are a rarity on the Kyiv academic stage. However, another thing is more important. Probably this was for the first time since these music forums are conducted in Ukraine that an attempt was made to introduce opuses of the Dutch composition school, one of Europe’s most prominent and rich in talent, into the Ukrainian context.
In fact, the concert was built up as a certain comparison of the Ukrainian and Dutch composers’ works: three plays on the one side and four on the other. However, it would be a mistake to view the Time and Perception as something like a musical competition. What happened at the Composers’ House was rather a dialog between different composers’ ideologies, musical cultures that perfectly supplement each other. While in the Dutch compositions one could see some tendency toward surface effects, contrasting touches, experiments with rhythm and melody (like in the Search by Gus Janssen or Willem Yets’s Interlacement), the Ukrainians tended to introspection, trying to understand the inner world and its correlation with the sound space (Capriccio by Serhiy Piliutykov, Zoltan Alamshi’s Sonata for Cello and Piano, or Oleksandr Shchetynsky’s Message to Anton Webern).
It is hard to give preference to any one participant; everybody in the audience could find something close to him or her in one play or another. It is should be mentioned that the regularity, philosophical depth, and academic quality of the Ukrainian opuses were counterbalanced by the Dutch relaxed nature. It is interesting that they have a distinct jazz basement: Gus Janssen and Teo Luvendi (the Lerchen Trio dedicated to Olivier Messian’s memory) are famous in their native country as first class jazz improvisers. Incidentally, this fact presented some difficulties for the performers who were inexperienced in jazz.
However, in general, the dialog between composers’ schools and their ways of perception did work. And this is only the first step. In mid- May Kyiv will host the Forum of Young Music where such musical interconnections will be in the order of the day. After all, there are too many things in this world that separate us, and only music is able to break down all borders.
