Studio for New Music soloists ensemble

Conductor — Sergey Akimov

Daria Khrisanova (soprano)
Ignat Krasikov (clarinet)
Natalia Cherkasova (piano)
Pavel Polyakov (violin)

Programme:

On 24 April, in the Rachmaninoff Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, the Studio for New Music will hold the marathon concert “When Time Overflows Its Banks”. The idea of the marathon is to trace, in a single evening, the path of the contemporary school of composition that originates from ASM-2, and to offer its own version of a “sound anthology” of the era.

Recording the milestones in the development of contemporary music, the Studio holds such marathons once every few years. This programme line was launched ten
seasons earlier with the marathon concert “Territory of Contemporary Art: Twenty Years Later” at the TERRITORIЯ festival, where works from the “turning-point” year of 1991 were presented in dialogue with pieces by young composers born around the early 1990s.

The current marathon, in three parts, is devoted to the avant-garde trends of the first quarter of the 21st century, presented in all their diversity of generations, styles and genres. That is why the programme brings together pieces by 15 composers that are not usually performed on the same evening — from ensemble works to stage performance, musical video art and a composition for sound objects.

The “trajectory” of the evening is meant to outline the direction of development of the school of composition that has taken shape at the Moscow Conservatory since 1992, over three decades. The first part of the marathon features short pieces by recent graduates written during their student years, as well as early works by composers of today’s middle generation. The second part of the concert captures the emergence of a new palette of compositional genres and the “performative turn” that became especially noticeable from the 2010s onwards. The third part of the programme consists of large-scale “state” pieces written by alumni of the same school of composition who now live in different countries.

The title of the concert, “When Time Overflows Its Banks”, thematises the processual nature of the evening and the attempt to capture one of the pages of the present
musical era. The ideas, values and individual style of each of the 15 composers who began their journey in a Moscow Conservatory class spread through time and space, marking a movement towards new shores. Each of them creates their own path, both in sound and in life; and together, setting out from a common point, they draw a new map of “The Garden of Forking Paths”.