All those who have visited Odesa’s Two Days and Nights of New Music even once are not likely to dispute my saying that this festival has long taken its own clearly outlined place on the cultural map of Ukraine. Even though its timeframe — 48 hours with time to sleep — is quite attractive, the event has not as yet acquired the scope it deserves. Yet, every time it is held, in April marking the peak of Odesa’s singular spring, the festival attracts topnotch performers from a number of countries.
This ninth festival, unlike the previous one, had a chamber touch to it and turned out less spectacular. The emphasis on theatricality was shifted to musical experimentation, quite unusual combinations of instruments and artistic temperaments. There were enough lighting premieres and domestic compositions matched those from abroad. Another interesting aspect was an active involvement of female composers. Yet this was not surprising, either, as the Days and Nights’ invariable manager Karmella Tsepkolenko is also a prolific composer. On the first night the German group Neue Flotentone performed her new Duel Duet No. 8. Among other premieres were Liudmyla Samodayeva’s Prayer for Selve, Svetlana Azarova’s Funk Island, Yuliya Gomelskaya’s Karl and Clara, Maya Virsalidze’s Two Wings, and Bohdana Froliak’s Magni Nominis Umbra. Also, the festival presented the CD, Odkrovennia Tainy [Mystery Unveiled], with a multimedia database relating to Ukrainian female composers. A quality job, done by Karmella Tsepkolenko’s New Music Association, still to be received by the critics and broader cultural circles. The disk includes bilingual detailed information about more than twelve composers, complete with CVs, full lists of works, photos, and over 100 compositions (22 hours of music in all). The importance of the CD for both professional performers and music lovers is hard to overestimate, considering that domestic recording companies obviously ignore national composers of both sexes.
The festival opened with a rather unusual group consisting of two quartets, a French horn one from Odesa Conservatory and Main Ufer Percussion, led by the festival’s president Berngard Wolf. They performed Steffen Schlaermacher’s expressive Acht! Still, there were few discoveries made on the first night. The audience seemed especially impressed by the German duet Neue Flotentone: two gifted and very artistic flutists Anna Horstman and Derte Ninstedt. Both turned out virtuoso musicians and with a striking selection of flutes, including a double-bass blockflute and a sub-double-bass blockflute. All this left the music lovers present in a state of quiet ecstasy. Considering that both performers were very pretty, one could understand how those shouting in the audience Bravo, little ones! felt.
Traditionally, the most interesting events took place on the second night. It began with Serhiy Pyliutikov’s Ricochet group from Kyiv. Actually, they repeated the program they had done in the capital, mostly consisting of modern Dutch composers. The festival reached its peak with the appearance on stage of a German duet of Elsbet Moser (button accordion) and Nicholas Altstedt (cello). Both are superb musicians and Ms. Moser is a living legend of modern European music. She was the one to bring the button accordion from the folk periphery to the summit of philharmonic recognition. She also helped Sofia Gubaidullina immigrate to Germany. Both are good friends and she is the first performer of many works by the talented composer (Gubaidullina wrote one of her best button accordion works, Silenzio, specially for Elsbet Moser).
In Odesa, Moser and Altstedt showed a brief but very saturated program, including Moritz Eggert’s burlesque La Risposta (written specially for the duet), Isang Jung’s pensive Intermezzo, lyrical solo cello Three Lines in the Name of Zacher, and Gubaidullina’s grand De Profundis which Elsbet Moser performed with a penetrating dramatic touch.
The German duet’s challenge was hard to pick; the rest of the performers had to play with at least matching skill, but the organizers did a good job shaping the program. The strongest contestants appeared in the finals. French violinist Noemi Schindler proved none the worse, coping beautifully with her sophisticated and versatile numbers, including even the unusual Macristalhias for the violin and soundtrack.
Whereas Noemi Schindler and the German duet showed formal finesse and utmost philosophic saturation, the Swiss group Amaltea (Barbara Bossert, flute; Andrienne Richard, soprano; Eva Swaar, piano) would be long afterward remembered for the sensual beauty of their repertoire. The audience felt an almost physical delight listening to Christian Genking’s The Light in May and Assedo, Yulia Gomelskaya’s Beyond Levitation to Gwinet Lewis’s lyrics, and especially Franzig Ali Sade’s refined and warmly poetic Three Watercolors.
Unfortunately, the Ukrainian musicians offered considerably fewer numbers worth being discussed in terms of subtle interpretation. Of course, they diligently showed everything they had learned at their conservatories and music colleges, but they often betrayed a lack of understanding of the composer’s message, intellectual as well as emotional. They even lacked the basic sense of humor inherent in ironic postmodern compositions like John Cage’s First Part of Salon Music, in which the percussions had to use their tongues rather than hands to produce a rhythmical chitchat effect. Festival president Bernhard Wolf’s group, Mein-Uffer Percussion, handled the task beautifully. Stefan Kostenbader, Guza Guba, Michael Winkler, and Thomas Welsch actually did the festival’s closing numbers. A responsible task, as they had to make the event remembered until next year’s Two Days and Nights. The four smart Germans not only brought the audience fully awake from the fatigue of over ten hours of music marathon, but sent it into an ecstasy, performing Wolfgang Reifeneder’s Boxing Day on cardboard boxes. A pure fairy tale of rhythms, a dance of matter stirred into a fiery dance, catching in its whirlpool both the musicians and the audience.
In general, the festival Two Days and Nights of New Music, despite all its hardships (mainly financial, as is perhaps the case with all such extraordinary events), is very much alive and making headway, moving in a direction shown by the very logic of the cultural process in Ukraine turning it into a venue of meetings of domestic and Western contemporary art. Among other festivals in Ukraine, the Two Days and Nights held in cosmopolitan Odesa seems to have most closely approached that level. It is a pity that so much depends on so many factors that have nothing to do with creativeness, but that is another tale.
Thus one is left waiting and guessing what the witty Karmella will have in store for the next, tenth festival.
