09 October 2017, 20:00
New Tretyakov gallery. Address: Krymsky Val, 10
REVOLUTION IN SOUND: music of the Soviet revolution and the industrialization era
The 13th SOUND UP concert marks the 100-year anniversary of the 1917 revolution, and will present an array of musical experiments dating from the avant-garde epoch – the pieces of music that mark the post-revolution period and the industrialization era, and were set to revolutionize sound.
The listeners will find themselves in the epicenter of a 1920s sound lab – the musicians will be located under, over and near the audience, on all the floors of the central foyer of the New Tretyakov Gallery. Echoing and ‘rivaling’ ensembles, led by two conductors, will perform landmark opuses, sometimes full of fury and ruthless rhythms, that reflect the spirit of the industrialization and the first five-year industrial plan of the Soviets.
In the excerpts from ballets with telltale titles like ‘The Bolt’ (by Shostakovich), ‘The Iron Foundry’ (by Mosolov), in the short futuristic piece ‘Rails’ (by Deshevov), the composers recreate the movements of factory mechanisms using musical means – in a very naturalistic way (a famous excerpt from Mosolov’s ballet is titled ‘Factory. Music of the Machines’). The lyrical culmination point of the concert will be the piece with a solo of the first electric instrument from the 1920s – theremin, played using the performer’s hands moving near its electromagnetic field. The first in the 21st century in Moscow and the most large-scale ever in the Russian capital, the performance of the celebrated rhythmic score ‘Workers Union’ by Louis Andriessen will be the strong final point of the evening.
The event’s guests will have a chance not only to hear the sound portrait of the era, but also to see its visual imprint, visiting a large-scale thematic exhibition at the New Tretyakov Gallery, ‘Someone 1917’. The exhibition showcases the most significant paintings and sculptures – by Kandinsky, Malevich, Rodchenko, Serebryakova, Petrov-Vodkin, etc. – dating back to the year of the revolution. The exhibition presents works from the collections of leading Russian museums, the Tate gallery and the Centre Pompidou, and will allow the visitors to fully immerse in the atmosphere of the watershed era, experienced by its contemporaries as a new stage in the world history.
EVENING PROGRAM:
Campari cocktail
‘First Airphonic Suite’ for theremin and orchestra, Joseph Schillinger (1929)
‘The Bolt’, Dmitry Shostakovich (1931)
‘The Iron Foundry’, Alexander Mosolov (1927)
‘Rails’, Vladimir Deshevov (1926)
‘First Soviet Chamber Symphony’???, Nikolay Roslavets (1927)
‘Workers Union’, Louis Andriessen (1975)
Visit of the ‘Someone 1917’ exhibition
Campari cocktail
The ‘Revolution in Sound’ concert marks the beginning of the collaboration between SOUND UP festival, the Moscow Conservatory and the ‘Studio for New Music’ ensemble – a key Russian ensemble performing avant-garde music.