April 21th: Lecture and Video Screening of the Opera by S. Sciarrino (Italy) and the Concert of ensemble écoute (Switzerland)

The second day of the festival was marked by the opening of its lecture program at the Museum Center. A Musicologist from Moscow Marianna Vysotskaya told about the features of the musical style of the Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino (born in 1947) and presented his opera Luci mie traditrici ("Deceitful Light of My Eyes"), written in 1998. "Ecology of Sound", the cult of Beauty, aesthetics of silence, sophistication and frugality of means identified the individuality of Sciarrino’s music, notably distinguishing him from a number of masters of the second half of the XX century. At the level of the materials, the center of his attention was focused on the elements previously attributed to the so-called "aids": harmonics in the strings, multiphonic overtones and noise from wind and others. In the opera, the starting point for which was the tragic story of Gesualdo di Venosa, all the historical details were excluded, but the theme of "genius and evil" was given in the large-scale synthesis. The methods of composer’s work with the borrowed materials ("blurring"), and his personal way of creating the authentic flavor: untuned unisons imitate the sound of the ensemble of the Renaissance.

The Opera "Deceitful Light of My Eyes" had undergone more than 10 theatrical releases. The audience was presented a video of the Moscow performance, carried out in 2012 under the program NMT ("New Music Theatre") in the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theater.

In the evening the Swiss ensemble écoute performed in the Organ and Chamber Music Hall (formerly the German Lutheran church): Asako Motoshima — soprano, Avital Cohen — flute, Christoph Jaggin — guitar. Despite the originality of its staff, the ensemble had an extensive repertoire. The concert program included works of European and Azerbaijani composers, some of which being written as a special order of the team. The culmination of the program was a series by Jürg Wyttenbach Laut Käfig for voice and guitar on texts of the 17 Haiku by Kobayashi Issa and other Japanese poets. As interludes sounded the short plays by composer Stephen Zelenka (Switzerland/Hungary), written specifically for this purpose and using unconventional means — objects, paper, body of the artist —as a source of sound. A number of interludes, elements of instrumental theater and refined sound color perception of the program identified its perception as a single "aesthetic ritual".

Prepared by Julia Dmitrioukova, Press Center of the Festival