Boris Tishchenko - Symphony No. 6, for Soprano, Contralto and Symphony Orchestra, Op.105 (1989) Dedicated to the memory of E. A. Mravinsky Soprano - Valentina Yuzvenko Contralto - Elena Rubin USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra Conductor - Gennady Rozhdestvensky Recorded Live at the Grand Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic, Leningrad, USSR, 27 April 1989 1. Sentimental March (Anatoly Naiman) - 0:00 2. Echo (Anna Akhmatova) - 26:49 3. I Am (Marina Tsvetaeva) - 32:24 4. Age-Haunted (Osip Mandelshtam) - 37:46 5. One Of My Mind (Vladimir Levinzon) - 45:36 The first of the five movements lasts more than the other four put together. It is a grand, plungingly histrionic and thunderous statement with a sense of gritty victory won at terrible cost. Soprano Yuzvenko contests with an orchestral canvas that delivers great salvos and groaning protests as well as rich undulant swathes of sound and shimmering tremors. Towards the end of the movement the voice of Elena Rubin can be heard unaccompanied and distant in dialogue with Yuzvenko. There is even a whispered choral section. This is a dazzling movement full of strange landscapes and constant engagement of head and heart. In the last four minutes it all takes surreal and even operatic flight in the hands of orchestra and Yuzvenko. Then come four short movements. The composer has worked with the words of Anna Akhmatova for many years and turns to her again in setting the poem Echo. It is grim and taciturn and - like all of this music - of indomitable strength. The words are nicely differentiated by the alto. Next comes a setting of Marina Svetaeva's I am just your dream bringing us back to the now rested soprano. The poetry is enigmatic but is lit with a subtext of bitter protest which in its crashing outrage recalls Shostakovich. The fourth movement is a setting of Age-haunted by Osip Mandelshtam. This moves with a slower burning flame than its predecessor but it too is grandiloquently scored and scarred by tragedy. The finale sets words by Vladimir Levinzon. Its progress patters and moves forward with a discreet determined lame-legged ostinato. Yet it manages to meld the elements of a waltz as the voices of the two women entwine. The poem suggests precious consolation in the confiding but not quiet words Are you still alive? / I'm still alive .... Are you still here .... I am. Read more: http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2008/May08/Tischenko6_NFPMA9947.htm#ixzz739NCu4rU Join the Score Video Creator Discord Server: https://discord.gg/QRbwTRs Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ryanpower ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbEkhc_FWaU

Brian Ferneyhough - Les Froissements d'Ailes de Gabriel, for guitar and ensemble (2003) Scene 2 from the opera 'Shadowtime' (1999-2004) ELISION Ensemble Condcutor - Franck Ollu Guitar - Geoffrey Morris "Les froissements des Ailes de Gabriel (The beatings of Gabriel's wings) brings together two persisting threads in Ferneyhough's music of the past couple of decades. On the one hand, it continues a series of works for soloist and chamber ensemble, each of which finds a new way of evoking yet questioning the traditional "concerto" concept. On the other, it forms part (in fact, the second scene) of the "scenic work". Shadowtime, an "opera ofs" centering on the philosopher Walter Benjamin that has preoccupied the composer since 1999. Without wishing to push paradox too far, one might say that we are dealing here with a "concerto" that is not really a concerto, forming part of an "opera" that is not really an opera. The figure invoked in the title is, evidently, the angel of the Annunciation, the rustling of whose wings long ago opened Heinrich Biber's cycle of "Mystery Sonatas", and more significantly, led the 12th century Persian mystic Sohravardi to surmise that the two wings -- one orientated to celestial light, the other to earthly shadow -- were the channel by which divinity could pass from heaven to earth. But there's a broader angelology at work here. Since Shadowtime revolves around Benjamin, the natural starting point is Paul Klee's picture Angelus Novus -- in Benjamin's interpretation, an image of the "Angel of History" who gazes back at the debris of everything that still lies in front of us. This in turn evokes the "terrifying" angels of Rainer Maria Rilke's "Duino Elegies": the ones who "serenely disdain to annihilate us". Les froissements des Ailes de Gabriel is the one scene of Shadowtime where -- perhaps self-evidently -- no words are sung or spoken. So what is it doing in an "opera"? It's no surprise to learn that it has a symbolic function. After a more or less realistic first scene, at the hotel on the Spanish border where Benjamin will commit suicide, this "angel concert(o)" seeks to perform a sort of allegorical "extinction of time" analogous to the "deafness to time" sometimes attributed to angels (who are alleged to act within time, but to be oblivious to it). The work is written for solo guitar and an ensemble of 13 players: 4 woodwinds, 3 brass, 2 strings, and various "struck and plucked" instruments (harp, piano, percussion, and most notably a second guitar, tuned down a quarter-tone, which one can partly regard as the soloist's "dark other"). Ferneyhough describes the piece as "an investigation of suddenness as aesthetic and formal category", and this in itself gives cause for thought. For most composers (and indeed listeners), musical "form" acts as a kind of security: as something reliable to cling on. With Ferneyhough, this is rarely, if ever, the case: on the contrary, "form" is conceived more as a precarious tightrope over an abyss. But even in Ferneyhough's terms, Les froissements represents an extreme. He once described it, with a touch of gallows humour, as "245 bars of total non-sequiturs"; more specifically, there are 124 fragments, each rarely more than a few seconds in length, and each meticulously sculpted, with its own distinctive instrumentation and (often glittering) "texture types". The point at issue here is that the material intentionally passes by too fast for one to make connections, even if they do in fact exist. This is turn gives an ironic twist to the invocation of Gabriel: can his message -- his "annunciation" - in fact be received within "human" time? In this context, it may not be too fanciful to interpret the soloist's last, whirling figure as a final, exasperated rustling of the angel's wings." - Programme Notes from the Elision Ensemble Join the Score Video Creator Discord Server: https://discord.gg/QRbwTRs PATREON - Pay a small monthly fee and gain access to my online score library, full of rare scores that I have used in videos - https://www.patreon.com/ryanpower PAYPAL - Donations of any amount welcome! - https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/officialryan3?country.x=GB&locale.x=en_GB ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_kkwdrkA6Q

*Thank you to SoupyMold for giving me this video to use* https://www.youtube.com/c/SoupyMold Timur Alexandrovich Ismagilov - Album Leaf (1999) Join the Score Video Creator Discord Server: https://discord.gg/QRbwTRs Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ryanpower ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuFK2dz2WFY

Iannis Xenakis - Antikhthon, for orchestra (1971) New Philharmonia Orchestra Conductor - Elgar Howarth Antikhthon (Greek: Ἀντίχθων, which can be translated as Counter-Earth) is a ballet for orchestra composed by Iannis Xenakis in 1971. George Balanchine commissioned this composition in 1969, after having choreographed successfully two compositions by Xenakis in the past: Metastaseis and Pithoprakta, completed in 1955 and 1957 respectively. Even though these two compositions were not initially thought to be ballets, Xenakis already had previously written a ballet: Kraanerg, for orchestra and tape. Antikhthon was composed to be premiered by the New York City Ballet. "He left the choice of subject to me; I could write either program music with a plot or music without a story, i. e. abstract music. I chose this latter form, but I gave it a mysterious, evocative title, in order to convey to the choreographer a semblance of an argument that would be more "concrete" than pure musical thoughts." — Iannis Xenakis, Notes on the orchestral score of Antikhthon The Pythagorean term anti-khthon means Counter-Earth. This Greek term comes from the fifth or sixth century, when the Pythagoreans were the first people to assert that the earth is not the center of the universe. They believe that all the planets and stars, including a counter-earth which was invisible from the earth, revolved around a central invisible fire. According to Xenakis, his music displayed an involuntary affinity with these ideas. The premiere of Antikhthon took place in Bonn, on the Festival Xenakis, on 21 September 1974, with the Festival Xenakis Orchestra conducted by Michel Tabachnik. The piece was later published by Éditions Salabert in 1986. George Balanchine, who commissioned the piece, never staged the ballet. Even though Xenakis felt deeply appealed by the idea of the Antikhthon, Balanchine was much more pragmatic about what he thought he could achieve, as he stated that it is limited to "the movements we can make with our limbs, our trunk and our head — and that's all. The vocabulary of ballet... is not rich". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikhthon Join the Score Video Creator Discord Server: https://discord.gg/QRbwTRs PATREON - Pay a small monthly fee and gain access to my online score library, full of rare scores that I have used in videos - https://www.patreon.com/ryanpower PAYPAL - Donations of any amount welcome! - https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/officialryan3?country.x=GB&locale.x=en_GB ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQYYdq7N3rc