Early Music Festival Prepares for New Start

By Galina Stolyarova

The St. Petersburg Times

Published: August 31, 2010 (Issue # 1605)

For The St. Petersburg Times Andrei Reshetin, artistic director of the Early Music Festival, during a performance in St. Petersburg.

Now in its thirteenth year, the city’s groundbreaking Early Music Festival returns on September 5. Every fall, vibrant performances of its refined ensembles evoke, embody and revive the long-lost noble spirit of St. Petersburg.

The event kicks off at the State Academic Cappella on Sept. 5 with a concert by the world-renowned Collegium Vocale Gent under the baton of Philippe Herreweghe of Johann-Sebastian Bach’s famous Mass in B Minor.

Founded in 1970 by Herreweghe, the ensemble has gained international fame for its fresh and innovative interpretations of Baroque and Renaissance repertoire. The orchestra’s discography now 65 features stunning recordings.

“The morning recitals at the Queen’s Hall remain one of the international festival’s great artistic trump cards,” wrote prominent British classical music reviewer Hugh Canning in an article for The Sunday Times about the performance of Haydn’s Songbook at the Edinburgh International Festival.

“It was certainly bold of Jonathan Mills to inaugurate the series with an all-Haydn programme that interspersed solo piano works with his all but unknown part-songs. Haydn is the only prolific composer I can think of whose entire oeuvre contains hardly a dull note, and the fortepianist Kristian Bezuidenhout and 12 singers from the splendid Collegium Vocale Gent — one of the world’s great small professional choirs — proved the point again. It was a tantalising concert.”

Early music, embracing everything created between the medieval era through to early classicism, long remained a missing link in repertoires of Russian orchestras. The brainchild of local enthusiasts Marc de Mauny and Andrei Reshetin, the Early Music Festival was originally designed for a narrow circle of the initiated. But interest was instantly sparked, news traveled fast, and the event is now in full blossom.

For The St. Petersburg Times Collegium Vocale Gent, an internationally renowned ensemble from Belgium.

The festival — which has no equivalents or competitors in Russia — has, over the 13 years of its history, attracted some of the biggest names in early music to St.Petersburg. This year is no exception.

Over the course of the festival, which lasts a little over three weeks, ending on Sept. 30 with a concert by the internationally acclaimed French countertenor Philippe Yaroussky, renowned for his virtuoso coloratura technique in the baroque repertoire, and soloists of The Catherine the Great Ensemble.

Owing to financial difficulties, the Catherine the Great Orchestra — the first ensemble dedicated to performing early music and baroque works in contemporary Russia — has shrunk in size over the last three years. When the musicians do perform, they most often play duets, trios or quartets.

This year, Earlymusic is vigorously pushing geographic boundaries. Thus, the concert on Sept. 7, titled “Aristocrats of East and West,” in the Sheremetev Palace features prominent Italian harpsichordist Francesco Cera and “Sanjo,” a traditional Korean court music ensemble, which will enjoy its first exposure to the Russian public.

Sanjo, which literally translates from Korean as scattered melodies, is a solo genre and one of the most advanced forms in Korean music. It begins slowly and proceeds to a faster tempo, developing into spontaneous improvisations. Sanjo can be performed on various instruments but at present, the majority of musicians prefer bamboo flutes and various types of zither.

Another fine example of the festival’s cross-cultural mission is the “Oriental Ornament” lecture-concert, introducing Faik Chelebiev, who performs on a tar, a traditional Azeri folk instrument, presenting the art of muhgam, on Sept. 15, at the Museum of History of Religion. Mugham translates from Persian as time or the moment, is the predecessor of Azeri folk song. A mugham transcends the performer’s visual, emotional and acoustic experiences, from the singing of birds and flowing of rivers to the exultation of the birth of a child or sorrow at separation from loved ones.

For The St. Petersburg Times French countertenor Philippe Yaroussky.

“This festival is something more sophisticated than a string of decent concerts; we perceive it, rather, as a musical instrument,” said violinist Andrei Reshetin, artistic director of the Catherine the Great Orchestra, and the festival’s organizer. “When in good hands, a musical instrument can produce magical sounds that touch your heart and get under your skin.”

It is the policy of Reshetin, the festival’s godfather, to introduce the ensembles that once formed his own musical taste and influenced his preferences.

The festival has just produced a DVD recording of “Boris Goudenow,” the first-ever opera written by a European composer on a Russian theme, which will be distributed with the festival’s booklets.

Johann Mattheson’s 1710 opera Boris Goudenow — produced by the Early Music Festival and directed by Berlin choreographer Klaus Abromeit — enjoyed its Russian premiere at the Mikhailovsky Opera and Ballet Theater in autumn 2007.

Boris Godunov, regent of Russia from 1584 to 1598 and then the first tsar from 1598 to 1605, is one of Russia’s cultural icons. In Mattheson’s opera, the character of Boris, compared to the tsar that appears in Modest Mussorgsky’s opera “Boris Godunov” and as featured in Pushkin’s drama, comes across as a drastically different character. Presenting an unknown baroque version of “Boris Goudenow” in contemporary Russia proved a serious challenge.

The opera was written in 1710 in response to Peter the Great’s victory over Sweden at Poltava, and was clearly an attempt to answer the question: “What is this new strong emerging Russia?” It made an attempt to decipher the enigma that Peter the Great presented, and, almost three hundred years on, the issue is as resonant as ever. Western Europe is still struggling to crack the Russian enigma and guess the intentions of Russia’s current rulers, President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

For The St. Petersburg Times Philippe Herreweghe, conductor of the Collegium Vocale Gent.

The festival is enthusiastically trying new event formats. On Sunday, Sept. 12, Earlymusic offers the chance to spend a day in Gatchina, at The Earlymusic Day which features three concerts of Russian 18th century composers, both well-known and obscure, as well as music of Italy, Austria and France, performed by the Catherine the Great Ensemble, Musica Petropolitana Ensemble and harpsichordist Maria Uspenskaya (Moscow).

“We would really love to establish this form of event — where the audiences can enjoy a day out at a historical estate, with concerts taking place throughout the day — and develop it further,” Reshetin said. “Our other idea, which we are hoping to fulfill in the future, is the ‘Spiritual Garden’ — a version of The Early Music Day on Yelagin Island. In the early afternoon, the halls of Yelagin Palace and the islands gardens will host mugham performances as well as Buryat folk music, Taimyr shamanistic music concerts and a concert of performances on the gusli, a Russian folk instrument. After that, we hope the audiences will enjoy themselves in boats on the park’s romantic pond and watching lute players performing on two gondolas in the center of the pond, as the sun is going down. Then, the island’s quay, transformed into the stage, will host a ballet performance to the music of Jean Baptiste Lully.”

Another of the festival’s project is to bring together in one concert an ensemble performing Italian tarantella dances and traditional Siberian shamans. Just like shamanistic music, which is essentially an ecstatic trance technique, tarantella was originally created as an exorcist ritual that later evolved into a form of folk dances characterized by a fast upbeat tempo. In both cases, music originally served to directly influence human beings not just emotionally but also physically and mentally.

For full festival schedule,

visit www.earlymusic.ru