FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

May 13, 2008

(206) 434-9969

RUSSIAN PIANO DUO PERFORMS LONGING FOR HOME -

A PROGRAM DEDICATED TO the centenary of the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music

Chapel Performance Space at Good Shepherd Center, June 6, 2008, at 7:30pm

Seattle, WA – DoubleSharp presents the distinguished Russian piano duo Olga Skorbyashchenskaya and Konstantin Uchitel in its debut in Seattle. The artists will perform a unique program dedicated to the centenary of the foundation of the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music. The concert will take place at the Chapel Performance Space at the Good Shepherd Center in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood at 7:30pm on June 6, 2008. The concert is dedicated to the centenary of the foundation of the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music and is co-presented with Nonsequitur.

The Society for Jewish Folk Music was founded in 1908 in St. Petersburg as the first Russian organization to bring together those interested in Jewish musical culture; it soon opened branches in other cities. Honorary members of the organization were Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Anatolii Lyadov, and much of its membership was drawn from their students at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. The Society devoted a great deal of effort to collecting and publishing Jewish folklore and new music until it was dissolved during the early years of the Bolshevik regimen, with membership including Mikhail Gnesin, Iosif Akhron, Aleksandr Krein, Lazar Saminsky, Solomon Rozovsky, Mikhail (Moisei) Milner, and others. The activities of this organization had a large impact on the development of Jewish culture throughout the world.

The program of the concert consists of two parts.

Part I. Longing for home

Toska po rodine (Longing for home), by the contemporary St. Petersburg composer Leonid Desyatnikov (b. 1955) interprets the Jewish theme in a unique and unexpected fashion, engaging in a dialogue that is not without some irony with the well-known piece by Grieg. Desyatnikov's sad and witty talent often reveals itself in such dialogues – with Russian literature in his Liubov' i zhizn' poeta (The Life and Love of the Poet), based on the poems of Daniil Kharms and Nikolai Oleinikov; with operatic classics in his Deti Rozentalya (Rozenthal's Children), which was produced at the Bolshoi Theater in Mosow (in a production that is still a controversial topic of conversation there, for it included among its cast of characters clones of Mozart, Musorgsky, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner).

Narodnyi tanets (Folk dance), by the St. Petersburg composer Yurii Krasavin (b. 1953), was written for the Skorbyashchenskaya-Uchitel piano duet. Krasavin composed a ballet, Magrittomaniya (Magrittomania), which was produced with great success at the San Francisco Ballet and at the Bolshoi Theater, and he has written piano concertos that join avant-garde conceptual music with the highly-refined language of classical music. In Narodnyi tanets, Krasavin uses stylized elements from Jewish folklore, a procedure he has adopted in the past as well.

The works by these St. Petersburg composers (although, by coincidence, both were born in Kharkov) is joined to the music of Ravel (in whose work Jewish themes occupy an important place), Schubert, and Brahms. It is of note that Ravel won a folk song competition in Moscow with a composition on Russian and Jewish songs.

Franz Schubert's Moments musicaux and the Hungarian Dances by Johannes Brahms carry the listener back to the atmosphere of Vienna, home of the varied music of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its people. The dances and songs of Hungarians, Rumanians, Ukrainians, Austrians, Czechs, and other people and the music of the Jewish klezmer players nourished one another, contributing to the mystic sonic world of Central Europe. Leopold Godovsky's arrangement of Schubert reverts, as it were, back to the outlines of the work's original conception.

II. Music of the Jewish Stage

The play Dibbuk (Gadibuk; The Dibbyk) is by S. An-sky, the pseudonym of the well-known scholar and ethnographer Semyon Rappoport. This play, translated from Russian into modern Hebrew by the great poet Khaim Nahman Bialik, was produced by the famous Russian director Yevgenii Vakhtangov at the studio "Gabima," the first Hebrew theater in Moscow, which continues today in Israel. This was an extremely important production in the history of this theater. The play is a reconstruction of Hassidic life, telling their story with mysticism and heightened emotion; the music was written by critic and composer Yulii Engel (1868-1927), one of the outstanding figures in Jewish culture. Engel was a very important, very penetrating critic who wrote hundreds of articles about Russian composers. Among his compositions is the first Jewish opera, Esfir' (Esther, 1894). He was honorary chairman of the Moscow branch of the Society for Jewish Folk Music, and in Berlin in the 1920s he founded the Society for Publication of Jewish Music. In 1924 Engel emigrated to Palestine, where he collected Jewish folklore and became one of the founders of the Folk Conservatory.

Koldun'ya (Die Kishufmacherin, The Sorceress) is one of the best known plays by the founder of Yiddish theater, Avraam Goldfaden (1840-1908). It was written in Russia and enjoyed great success there and then, when the first professional Jewish acting troupe went to the United States, it was performed here with equal success. Goldfaden wrote the melodies to his own verses. Many of these simple songs became folktunes, beloved by millions of Jews on both sides of the ocean. The music of Koldun'ya and Sulamif (Shulamith, or The Daughter of Jerusalem) is the sonic context for the novel Bluzhdaiushchie zvezdy (Wandering Stars) by Sholom Aleichem.

For a production of the play Koldun'ya in Minsk just before the Second World War, Mikhail (Moisei) Milner wrote new texts to Goldfaden's music. Milner (1886-1953) was one of the most important Jewish composers in the Soviet period. He wrote outstanding vocal works, music for the theater, and the first opera in Yiddish, Nebesa pylaiut (Blazing Heavens), which was produced in Petrograd in 1923. Milner lived in Leningrad throughout his life, even during the German blockade, and was the last member of the Society for Jewish Folk Music. The score of Koldun'ya was lost during the war, but Konstantin Uchitel has reconstructed the work for keyboard based on surviving sketches.

Mikhail Gnesin (1883-1957) was one of the best-known composers in Russia from around 1910 to the 1940s, an outstanding figure in the musical world and an important teacher (the Gnesin family founded the famous music school in Moscow and Mikhail Gnesin established the conservatory in the city of Rostov). Gnesin wrote the opera-poem Yunost' Avraama (Abraham's Youth), many striking orchestral works (including the so-called symphonic dithyramb Vrubel and the Symphonic monument 1905-1917), and the towering trio In Memory of our Dead Children. Gnesin's students included Aram Khachaturian, Tikhon Khrennikov, Yevgenii Svetlanov, and Boris Klyuzner. Gnesin was a great admirer of Jewish music and at the request of the important Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold, who in a seminal event in 1926 produced Gogol's The Inspector General at his Moscow theater, Gnesin wrote the suite The Jewish Band at the Ball in Nothing-town. It is a wonderful work replete with the tenderest lyricism, irony, and the grotesque.

Pianist Olga Skorbyashchenskaya studied piano at the (former) Leningrad Conservatory, where she graduated in 1987. After that she completed her graduate studies in music history and is an assistant professor at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. The foundation of her piano repertoire is the music of the German Romantic period and contemporary Russian music, and she has performed in Great Britain, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Ukraine, Italy, and cities throughout Russia. Composers Evgenii Roitman, Iurii Krasavin, and Derek Melville have composed works for her. Skorbyashchenskaya is a member of the Russian Composers' Union and has written more than a hundred scholarly and critical articles.

Konstantin Uchitel, a historian of musical theater and a music critic, graduated from the St. Petersburg Academy of Theatrical Art as a specialist in the theatrical management and a historian. He has written over four hundred articles and essays and received graduate degree in music history. He has produced festivals of contemporary music and has written dramatic works and operatic and ballet libretti, two of which were used fir performances at the Mariinsky Theater. He is a jazz pianist and has premiered works by Iurii Krasavin, Anatolii Korolev, and other contemporary St. Petersburg composers. Uchitel has performed in international music festivals, has composed music for the theater and is a member of the Russian Composers' Union.

DoubleSharp is a non-profit organization established to present artistic and educational events with excellence, creativity, and diversity in order to actively promote the appreciation of contemporary and world music and to challenge, educate, and enrich our audiences. DoubleSharp is dedicated to researching contemporary and world music and to enriching American and world audiences with musics of other cultures. For more information, call (206) 434-9969 or visit www.DoubleSharp.org.

Nonsequitur is a non-profit organization dedicated to the presentation of experimental music and sound art: contemporary / post-classic composition, improvisation, electro-acoustic and computer music, minimalism, sound poetry, radio art, sound installations, field recordings, microtonality, newly invented instruments, "lower case sound", historical avant garde, and various unclassifiable hybrids.

Program

Friday, June 6, 2008, at 7:30pm

Chapel Performance Space at the Good Shepherd Center

4649 Sunnyside Ave. N., Seattle (in Wallingford, just south of 50th St.)

LONGING FOR HOME

† Olga Skorbyashchenskaya, piano

• Konstantin Uchitel, piano

Part I. Longing for home

†•Edvard Grieg, "Longing for Home"*

†•Leonid Desyatnikov, Longing for Home

†Mikhail Milner, Agada (Fairy Tale)

• Konstantin Uchitel, Tishe Yidysh**

†•Johannes Brahms, Two Hungarian Dances

†•Maurice Ravel, Chanson hébraïque

†•Yurii Krasavin, Narodnyi tanets (Folk dance)**

†•Franz Schubert, Moments musicaux, f minor*

Intermission

Part II. Music of the Jewish Stage

†•Yulii Engel, Suite from Dibbuk (The Dibbyk)* (a play by S. An-sky)

†•Goldfaden-Milner, Koldun'ya (The Sorceress)*, musical fragments for the play by Avraam Goldfaden

†•Mikhail Gnesin, Evreisky orkestr na balu u Gorodnichego (The Jewish band at the ball in Nothing-town)*, a suite from the play based on The Inspector General, by Gogol

* - transcribed for piano four-hands and performed for the first time

** - first performance in the United States

Admission is $15.

The Good Shepherd Center is located in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood at 4649 Sunnyside Ave. N. (just south of 50th St., one block east of Meridian), on the fourth floor.

Media and Ticket Information Contact: DoubleSharp@DoubleSharp.org; (206) 434-9969