So a blizzard came through our town. Are you paralyzed? This is the upper Midwest and snow happens. Life goes on and our plows are deployed. This weekend the Elgin Symphony Orchestra (ESO) is featuring Russian music, and Russians know a thing or two about snow. Russians also make a certain kind of music, where emotion dwells deep inside while brilliant notes hang on the edge of your skin. You might want to get down to the Hemmens Auditorium and check it out.
This week’s concerts are a passage through four Russian composers spread over several generations and feature a brilliant young pianist who will play Shostakovich’s 2nd Concerto. If your heart is still beating, it wouldn’t hurt to hear how this sounds. Big mounds of snow will only put you in the right frame of mind.
One Russian composer, Mikhail Glinka, went so far as to claim that “nations create music, composers only arrange it.” This turns out to be something a Russian composer might be expected to say, for one after another, they were, for lack of a better word, ‘nationalistic’.
The Russian soul is neither European nor Asian, but both seemed at stake whenever Mussorgsky, Shostakovich, Borodin, or Tchaikovsky took to their task. This was true in the time of the czars as it was in the Communist era. And now that all that is past, Russians are still Russians; so if you have to slice through a winter’s chill and evade several thousand tons of snow to get to the concert hall, you will be warmed by the transcendent power of their music.
A good Russian might tell you that the best of times to hear such a thing would be just after the blizzard subsided. This is your chance.
I happen to be of that generation when the now long gone “Cold War” was all too real. This was a time when the Russians or “Soviets” who were so recently our allies against fascism became our mortal and nuclear enemies. Antagonisms aside, perhaps our lands and lives are similar, vast and a bit untamed. It is my small opinion that music is a way to calibrate this. Russian music has a certain type of resonance, one that Americans’ ears will find foreign and familiar, something that can be both complex and raw within the same moment.
The writer/ philosopher Diana Raffman said, “Emotional responses to music are neither correct nor incorrect ... typical or atypical, but not right or wrong.” It would be an oversimplification to say so, but not entirely untrue, to claim that Russian music embraces the grand gesture and the passionate chord a bit more willingly than its European counterparts, or dare we say in a sort of an American way. One cannot perfectly explain such a thing, but one can hear it, and to that degree, comrade Glinka was right, Russian music sounds ‘Russian.’ The composer is arranging his history and his environment. Yet Glinka was also hyperbolic, for every voice is individual and unique. A Night on Bald Mountain is not a swim in Sawn Lake; each composer has a gift for us.
As you will hear if you are lucky enough to get to one of this weekend’s concerts, this seems to hold true whether the composer was of the 19th or 20th century. But time or the context of time was never the issue. It was Tchaikovsky himself who said:
“Those who imagine that a creative artist can—through the medium of his art—express his feelings at the moment he is moved, make the greatest mistake. Emotions—sad or joyful—can only be expressed retrospectively.”
So yes, just like we tough Midwesterners, our Russian counterparts have been through wars, winters, love and hard times. I believe what Tchaikovsky was trying to express there—is that art, and in his case music—does for us indeed look back at all this wisdom and experience we have collected, either on our own or though our ancestors lives, and then project it out in front where we can bask in the many faceted realms of our emotions. The fact that we get to do that in a quiet and dignified way within a warm concert hall is as good an argument as any for the benefits of ‘civilization.’
Elgin’s own composer, Daniel Brewbaker, a snappy trumpet player in the Maroon band during my own high school years, received and then performed a commissioned work in 1999 for the Kirov Orchestra and Chorus in St. Petersburg, Russia. He was the first American to do this. It was an oratorio based on the poems of Alexander Pushkin.
Elgin goes to Russia. Russia comes to Elgin. The snow comes across the plains or howls through the tundra. It’s all music to my ears.
This week’s concerts are a passage through four Russian composers spread over several generations and feature a brilliant young pianist who will play Shostakovich’s 2nd Concerto. If your heart is still beating, it wouldn’t hurt to hear how this sounds. Big mounds of snow will only put you in the right frame of mind.
One Russian composer, Mikhail Glinka, went so far as to claim that “nations create music, composers only arrange it.” This turns out to be something a Russian composer might be expected to say, for one after another, they were, for lack of a better word, ‘nationalistic’.
The Russian soul is neither European nor Asian, but both seemed at stake whenever Mussorgsky, Shostakovich, Borodin, or Tchaikovsky took to their task. This was true in the time of the czars as it was in the Communist era. And now that all that is past, Russians are still Russians; so if you have to slice through a winter’s chill and evade several thousand tons of snow to get to the concert hall, you will be warmed by the transcendent power of their music.
A good Russian might tell you that the best of times to hear such a thing would be just after the blizzard subsided. This is your chance.
I happen to be of that generation when the now long gone “Cold War” was all too real. This was a time when the Russians or “Soviets” who were so recently our allies against fascism became our mortal and nuclear enemies. Antagonisms aside, perhaps our lands and lives are similar, vast and a bit untamed. It is my small opinion that music is a way to calibrate this. Russian music has a certain type of resonance, one that Americans’ ears will find foreign and familiar, something that can be both complex and raw within the same moment.
The writer/ philosopher Diana Raffman said, “Emotional responses to music are neither correct nor incorrect ... typical or atypical, but not right or wrong.” It would be an oversimplification to say so, but not entirely untrue, to claim that Russian music embraces the grand gesture and the passionate chord a bit more willingly than its European counterparts, or dare we say in a sort of an American way. One cannot perfectly explain such a thing, but one can hear it, and to that degree, comrade Glinka was right, Russian music sounds ‘Russian.’ The composer is arranging his history and his environment. Yet Glinka was also hyperbolic, for every voice is individual and unique. A Night on Bald Mountain is not a swim in Sawn Lake; each composer has a gift for us.
As you will hear if you are lucky enough to get to one of this weekend’s concerts, this seems to hold true whether the composer was of the 19th or 20th century. But time or the context of time was never the issue. It was Tchaikovsky himself who said:
“Those who imagine that a creative artist can—through the medium of his art—express his feelings at the moment he is moved, make the greatest mistake. Emotions—sad or joyful—can only be expressed retrospectively.”
So yes, just like we tough Midwesterners, our Russian counterparts have been through wars, winters, love and hard times. I believe what Tchaikovsky was trying to express there—is that art, and in his case music—does for us indeed look back at all this wisdom and experience we have collected, either on our own or though our ancestors lives, and then project it out in front where we can bask in the many faceted realms of our emotions. The fact that we get to do that in a quiet and dignified way within a warm concert hall is as good an argument as any for the benefits of ‘civilization.’
Elgin’s own composer, Daniel Brewbaker, a snappy trumpet player in the Maroon band during my own high school years, received and then performed a commissioned work in 1999 for the Kirov Orchestra and Chorus in St. Petersburg, Russia. He was the first American to do this. It was an oratorio based on the poems of Alexander Pushkin.
Elgin goes to Russia. Russia comes to Elgin. The snow comes across the plains or howls through the tundra. It’s all music to my ears.
