The Studio for New Music began its anniversary year (2023) with the concert series “A Guide to the Ensemble”. The idea of the project is to introduce listeners to the make-up of a contemporary music ensemble and to demonstrate its unique possibilities. The title of the series refers to the famous work by Benjamin Britten written at the beginning of the 20th century. But whereas Britten’s aim was to show the unity of the instruments of the classical orchestra, our project sets out to highlight the individuality of each timbre and to acquaint listeners with the wide palette of performance techniques that has enriched the language of new and newest music.

At the beginning of the 20th century the composer Arnold Schoenberg reduced the huge forces of the symphony orchestra to a group of 15 musicians. Such small line-ups later became typical of ensembles specialising in the music of the 20th and 21st centuries. With fewer musicians, each member of the ensemble came into full view and gained the opportunity to show their abilities to the full. Thanks to this feature, such groups came to be called “soloists ensembles”. The Studio for New Music is one of them.

Every musician of the Studio is not only a brilliant ensemble player but also a professional soloist capable of demonstrating the full range of their instrument’s expressive means. That is why the concerts of the series present works for soloists accompanied by the ensemble, highlighting the vivid individuality of our performers.

The project presented programmes with a wide chronological and geographical range. The Studio’s musicians performed works from the early 20th century as well as newly written pieces, compositions by Russian and foreign composers. A postscript to the series was Vladimir Gorlinsky’s piece “A Guide to the Ensemble”, written under the Union of Composers of Russia’s “Notes and Quotas” programme especially for the ensemble’s anniversary year and performed as part of the Moscow Philharmonic’s series “Another
Space. Continuo”.

On 22 February the Studio for New Music ensemble presented the world premiere of Alexey Sysoev’s piece Fingerprints. Soloist — Nikita Agafonov (clarinet). Conductor — Honoured Artist of Russia Igor Dronov.

Alexey Sysoev:
“The piece was written on 19 February 2011 and is dedicated to the great English improvising saxophonist Evan Parker. I wanted to transfer Parker’s famous innovative technique to the clarinet, to extend it, and at the same time the technical and expressive possibilities of the clarinet. What do we associate with Parker’s style of playing? Above
all, with virtually unlimited circular breathing, with the use of the very highest register (often with the ‘teeth on the reed’ technique), with non-standard fingerings and with what I call ‘multi-technique’, that is, breaking standard technique down into its ‘elementary’ components (breath, tongue, lips, teeth, fingers…) and combining them paradoxically. The result is a peculiar ‘sound magma’, very flexible, complex and changeable. I tried to apply similar technical ideas in my piece Fingerprints, which is a kind of small concerto for clarinet and ensemble”