One of the last musical events of the past year was the world premiere of the composition “After” (Post) by Vladimir Gorlinsky. The new piece turned out to be both daring and traditional.

Gorlinsky’s work was commissioned by the V-A-C Foundation, which gratifyingly joined the narrow circle of domestic institutions that issue orders to contemporary Russian composers. No less important is the fact that the premiere took place at the GES-2 House of Culture, a site that opened a little over a year ago and seemed to have been created for the sake of such projects. The assembly hall of GAS-2 is located as an amphitheater, and the entire backdrop of its stage is a window overlooking the garden. Snow-covered and dark, this garden, mirror-symmetrical to the audience rows in the hall, rises in the same amphitheater into the distance, where you can see the windows of the House on the embankment, winking at the curators and the public from the depths of their unkind history.

The sweetest thing to do here is to perform works weighed down by reflection, the burden of history and culture, like Salvatore Sciarrino’s opus “Le voci sottovetro”, “Voices Behind the Glass” (1998), which opened the concert. The voices, however, sounded not behind but in front of the glass, on the stage – but the glass seemed to pass inside the music itself. The modern Italian composer seemed to have seen through this glass the Sixth Book of Madrigals of his great compatriot Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa, who still surprises with his harmonic audacity. The famous murderous composer sounded from behind the glass, not with voices, as in the original. Still, with instruments – on top of the glass- Sciarrino laid a vocal part entirely composed of Gesualdo’s notes but running from voice to voice, joining one or the other instrumental lines. The vocals of Arina Zvereva, who usually sings modern music, were more appropriate in this case than the voice of some baroque singer would have been. The Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble musicians did an excellent job with the instrumental parts, among which were the bass flute, cor anglais, and bass clarinet. Gesualdo would probably be surprised to hear artificial violin harmonics and a hanging cymbal in the arrangement, but there must be some punishment for his grave sins.

In the newest work by Vladimir Gorlinsky, “After” (Post), which became the main dish of the one-act program, there were even more musicians from the MASM, and they surrounded the audience from all sides of the hall. They were all wrapped in wires, the tendrils of the instruments protruded from the pockets, pickups stuck to the bodies of the instruments like leeches. Sound engineer mixed a sound on the console, where it was completed in the manner of the acoustics of different churches – a wooden, metal, or a large cathedral: sound designer Mikhail Myasoedov participated in creating the spatial sound code.