The musicAeterna residency at KKL Luzern features a concert by the musicAeterna choir with a programme of Russian choral music of the 20th century on 7 October.
The musicAeterna choir will be conducted by Fedor Lednev, one of Russia’s leading contemporary conductors and a specialist in the music of the 20th and 21st centuries. Working for many years with Russia’s major theatres, orchestras, and contemporary music ensembles, he has conducted over 200 premieres of works by composers from Russia and other countries. Since 2019, Fedor Lednev has been the conductor of musicAeterna.
The central piece of the evening will be Dmitri Shostakovich’s Ten Poems on Texts of Revolutionary Poets. This rarely performed cycle was created at a time of increasing Soviet cultural control over the creative industries when artists had to find a compromise between their artistic quest and the demands of the state. The cycle of poems, Shostakovich’s first large-scale work for a cappella choir, both meets and refutes these demands. The music carefully fulfils the dictates of Party resolutions, the poets have an impeccable revolutionary reputation, and the texts are ideologically correct. At the same time, gloomy moods prevail in the music, while the reference to the memory of the ‘victims of the revolution’ turns into a secular liturgy, a requiem for all martyrs, who have fallen under the pressure of any form of political violence.
The concert programme also includes ‘Prayers’ by Dmitri Smirnov, a composer from St. Petersburg. ‘Prayers’ is one of the nine choral concertos created by Smirnov, a five-movement cycle based on texts from the liturgy of John Chrysostom. Creating it, the composer relied on the traditions of sacred songs from different countries, mixing them with modern composition techniques. The result was a concert composition, a personal statement, not intended for performance in churches and far from asceticism.
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