This composer’s music cannot be described using cliches. It is not religious, yet profoundly spiritual. It is not publicity-oriented, it is inherently dramatic, the latter perhaps owing to the fact that Maestro Kancheli spent twenty years as artistic director at the Shota Rustaveli Theater in Tbilisi [then capital of Soviet Georgia].
His music is not merely built on contrast; there is an abyss between such contrasts. Every silence and pause has an almost crucial meaning. Secreted in them is the composer’s main idea, which he wants to convey to the audience. And when his music reaches its peak, it is a moment pregnant with singular tension and might. This is precisely what Kyiv audiences heard and felt.
The concert, organized as part of the Art Grandees Project by the Mystetske Berezillia Producing Agency, involved brilliant musicians: conductor Leo Marquis (Holland), oboist Dmitry Bulgakov (Russia), saxophonist Arno Bornkamp (Holland), and the prominent viola-player Yury Bashmet — all flew to Kyiv on Giya Kancheli’s invitation and he asked his close friend Bashmet to change his concert schedule, so that he could come and play Kancheli’s Styx written specially for Bashmet. “But for Yury, there would’ve been no Styx ,” Kancheli once remarked. It is a sizable composition for soloist, choir, and symphony orchestra and it is in memory of the composer’s friends no longer among the living. Indeed, the Styx is the river of oblivion, over which the souls of the dead were ferried by Charon. The choir’s exclamations, heard now and then like a distant echo, pronounce names held dear by the composer. Listening to this, perceiving its depth, one can understand why Giya Kancheli admonishes the audience to keep quiet during pauses in the performance. Those keenly aware of the music are actually afraid to make the slightest noise at such moments, lest they sever the delicate link of identification.
Giya Kancheli’s concert was also unusual in that Yury Bashmet was not in the center of the performance, perhaps for the first time in his career. The celebrated composer may have used his friend’s mastery to make his message to the audience — and those to whom he addressed it in the first place and whose names were now and then pronounced by the choir — more complete. And he did it, albeit with much difficulty and a host of sacrificed nerve cells. Staging The Styx required painstaking effort and absolute professionalism by several performing groups. While the National Philharmonic, conducted by Leo Marquis, had enough experience and expertise, the choir from the University of Culture was an altogether different story. It was truly an unequal challenge for them, a choir obviously unprepared to cope with a project of such caliber. The National Opera’s choir had to decline participation owing to its heavy schedule and the organizing committee chose an ill-trained one, for whom Kancheli’s composition was simply beyond its members relatively tender years. There are several excellent choirs available in Kyiv, ones which would have had no problem picking the gauntlet. Some rough edges and loose ends notwithstanding, the concert became an event long to be remembered by music devotees. The Kyiv audiences are to meet with various noted musicians, drama companies, and ballet stars from the West and from the former socialist states.
