This lullaby is dedicated to my granddaughter. This was my reaction to good news I heard about the appearance of a girl named Kira in our family.
Rustem Galich, an actor of the artistic word, commissioned me to write music for a play named a "Demon", based on Mikhail Lermontov, a Russian classic. Since a lead role was performed by a soprano, I considered her part as operatic and wrote recitatives, arias and vocalise.
Sung Jin Hong, the artistic director/conductor of the "One World Symphony", New York based ensemble, commissioned the work for soprano and cello. Its world premiere was given as part of ensemble’s concert series in 2004.
The world premiere of this work was given by the One World Symphony, founded by students of the Conductors Institute at Bard, as part of two benefit concerts for the victims of the September 11 tragedy at the World Trade Center in New York.
In 2014, at Summit Music Festival (USA), Mikhail Svetlov, an extraordinary operatic bass, performed "My, She", the first movement of the work.
In 2003, the "One World Symphony Ensemble", conducted by Sung Jin Hong gave this monologue a world premiere. It is based on Chingiz Aitmatov's prose, an excerpt from his great novel "The Day That Lasts More Than a Hundred Years".
It received a world premiere in 2003 at the Tutti Festival in Ohio. There is no poetry used. The first movement ("Lyric Meditation") is a vocalise, and in the second ("Conversation with Bells") - the word "Bo-Bom" represents a bell sound.
The poetry of Fyodor Tyutchev, one the greatest Russian poet of the 19th century, sounds like a confession. The poems were dedicated to his great love - Elena Denisyeva. In the eyes of the highest St. Petersburg’s society, their open relationship was defiantly scandalous, and the entire burden of condemnation fell on the shoulders of Denisyeva.
The "Poem of the End" is a biographical work by Marina Tsvetaeva, one of the brightest, most remarkable Russian poets of the first half of the XX century. This is an internal monologue through which the heroine comes to understand the inevitability of a break in relations with a loved one.
This is an excerpt from the "Poem of the End" by Marina Tsvetaeva, she was one of the brightest, most remarkable Russian poets of the first half of the XX century. The "Poem" is a biographical work, an internal monologue through which the heroine comes to understand the inevitability of a break in relations with a loved one.
The "Six Servants" is written to the poems of famous English poets, such as E. Lear, R.L. Stevenson, M. Barrows and R. Kipling. Since the tessitura of the songs allows transposing them without any detriment to the sound, it is quite natural to imagine it performed by soprano or tenor.
I was attracted by the thoughts of Marina Tsvetaeva, an outstanding Russian poetess, about how the relationship between a man and a woman is built, and whether Don Juan really searched all his life for the one who could make him happy.
Robert Rozhdestvensky is one of the brightest representatives of so-called ‘poets of the sixties’ in the former USSR. The tense emotional degree of his poem conveys the desperate, to the point of madness, love of the lyrical hero for his beloved one, and, also, his readiness for forgiveness. A free monologue form with use of catchy song intonations is dominated in the music.
The monologues are based on the poems of the outstanding German symbolist poet Erich Rainer Maria Rilke, who had a cosmic, universal poetic gift. The cycle contains the following range of feelings: loneliness and helplessness, catastrophism and defenselessness.
In this poem Erich Rainer Maria Rilke, an outstanding German poet - symbolist, used sharp shifts in rhythm, bringing poetic speech closer to prose. In an effort to convey the greatest confusion of a person who has lost her sight, it is the "ragged rhythm", which changes its volume and rhythmic nature from line to line, that found its musical refraction.
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