It starts with a literal scream, a cry of pain from every player in the orchestra. The Ukrainian composer Anna Korsun’s piece Terricone is one of the most shattering creative acts of the war that began four years ago this month. Korsun was born in Donbas, where terricones, the slag heaps of the mining industry, bear witness to the way humankind has always reshaped the landscape. Her composition was premiered by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and its then chief conductor, the Ukrainian Kirill Karabits, at the start of 2023 – when news of the invasion brought worldwide shock and horror.
I’ll never forget being in Poole for that performance, as the vividness of it brought the fear and desolation of the emotional landscapes of the war to the audience. The Russian conductor Vladimir Jurowski – a vocal critic of Putin’s regime – brought the powerful piece to London last month, as part of a bold Ukrainian/Russian programme with the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
The creative courage of Korsun is astounding but far from unique, as Ukrainian musicians and composers find ways of living and working through the war. Among other performances that brought the cultural realities of the conflict to the UK is Opera Aperta’s Chornobyldorf, which the Kyiv-based company staged at the Huddersfield contemporary music festival in November 2022. Part opera, part video-installation, a folk-punk ritual for a post-Soviet, post-nuclear age, the performance brought the seismic forces of Ukrainian history to life in a breathtaking and unforgettable event.
But it is not the Ukrainian musicians’ compositions and performances that matter: the war continues to expose and shatter the half-truths and hypocrisies of classical music culture. The Russian conductor Valery Gergiev’s closeness to Putin’s regime was as clear in 2012 as it was in 2022, yet it was only after the conflict began that these ties were interrogated and his performances and contracts outside Russia were cancelled. (And I’m as culpable as any journalist, back in the years when Gergiev was principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, and when he was conductor of the World Orchestra for Peace – yes, that really happened, from 1998-2019, when Gergiev conducted 23 concerts and world tours.)
For some Ukrainian musicians, the new reality they have chosen is “no Russian words from my lips, no Russian music from my hand”, as Nazarii Stets, one of the players of the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra (UFO), founded and conducted by Keri-Lynn Wilson, puts it. Works such as Beethoven’s fifth and ninth symphonies – both of which the UFO have toured and recorded (with a version of the Ode to Joy sung in Ukrainian) – were also composed in a time of conflict, and have been mobilised as bellicose ideological soundtracks ever since. The feverish intensity and commitment of the UFO’s playing, on the new recording of Symphony No 5 especially, is the sound of fierce hope, the sound of lives depending on the purpose and possibility of this music as a herald of peace and a call to action.
Four years on, the war is more terrifying and more confronting precisely because it has become a fact of life, a steady state of horror. It no longer makes headlines in the same way, and those of us in the west risk forgetting that, for millions of Ukrainians today, the horror and trauma of the conflict is ever-present. Pieces like Korsun’s reveal the deeper realities of the consequences of the war. They are among the world’s most urgent musical messages.
Happy 100th, Kurtág!
The Hungarian composer György Kurtág celebrates his 100th birthday tomorrow. His reaction to the world of conflict in which he was born was a radical journey inwards, to a place in which each note is live with energy and possibilities: “The F# is also a human being,” is a typical phrase.
Kurtág’s longest piece, his opera on Beckett’s Endgame, premiered in 2018, when he was a mere 92. If his music isn’t yet part of your life’s listening, all you need are his most essential pieces, the 11 volumes of Játékok (Games). These are aphoristic piano pieces, some mere seconds long, and often taking just one idea or even one note for a tiny walk in time. They are like a composer’s diary entries, full of puns, play and pleasure, with titles like The Bunny and the Fox, Thistle, and – my favourite – Play With Infinity. They’re also tributes and memorials to his friends, to fellow musicians, and to his life-partner, the pianist Márta Kurtág, with whom he shared a soul and a piano bench. (Listen and watch their duet performances, her arms enclosing his on the keyboard in Bach transcriptions, and you’ll feel immediately what I mean.)
But watch out: these are “games” that play with the deepest and most existential stuff of music: they’re all playing with infinity.
This week Tom has been listening to: Kurtág’s Movement for Viola and Orchestra. Written in 1954, this is music that goes straight into your soul. The piece unfurls from gorgeously desolate dissonance to a strange, radiant vision of hope in its final moments.
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