Music From Other Minds

Program 697: Late-Soviet Composers

KALW Broadcast Date: May 22, 2022 | Host: Joseph Bohigian

On this Music from Other Minds, a program of music by composers from the former Soviet Union from the mid 1970s to early 1990s that looks outward, away from the country’s administrative center, engaging with influences at the edges of the Soviet East and South or looking toward Western Europe. These composers challenged the strictures placed upon them in their country at a time of increased opening and forged new paths for contemporary music in the region. Sofia Gubaidulina’s Offertorium represents a trend toward religious symbolism in the officially atheist country. Alfred Schnittke’s polystylism is on full display in his String Quartet No. 3, which quotes Lassus, Beethoven, and Shostakovich. Edison Denisov also references the past with his set of variations on a theme by Haydn in Death is a Long Sleep. Uzbek composer Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky imitates an Uzbek hammer dulcimer with a string quartet in his Chang Music IV. The ensemble Astraea, (Sofia Gubaidulina, Viktor Suslin, and Vyacheslav Artyomov) improvises on folk and ritual instruments from the Caucasus and Central Asia in Archipelagos of Sounds in the Ocean of Time. Finally, the program closes with Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov’s “Song Can Tend The Ailing Spirit” from Silent Songs, a tribute to the victims of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine which the composer states have made his quiet, reflective compositions “again become relevant.”

Program Audio

30-Second Spot