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Vladimir Martynov, Vita  Nuova: (Premier and Concert Performance)  Soloists,  London Philharmonic Orchestra / Vladimir Jurowski,  Royal Festival Hall, 18.2.2009 (GDn)


Vladimir Martynov is one of Russia’s most contentious composers. He is famous there for his outspoken attacks on a range of musical dogmas, opinions which have appeared in print in his numerous essays and books, and which he backs up with a substantial catalogue of compositions illustrating his favoured approach. For many musical revisionists, the rot set in with the birth of Modernism, for others Beethoven’s middle period was the apex of Western musical history, but Martynov’s radicalism stems from his view that European culture took a wrong turn at the Renaissance; the unity of purpose in mediaeval culture becoming fatally fragmented by the artistic focus on individual emotion and the musical principle of polyphony.

His choice of Dante’s La Vita Nuova as the subject for his new opera is therefore thoroughly polemical. Setting a subject that substantially predates the birth of opera also allows the work to act as a survey of intervening history of the genre.  And in keeping with the composer’s mediaevalist tendencies, the historical progress is depicted as something of a downward spiral. A variety of musical styles are used to illustrate his theme, but Martynov is most comfortable recreating organum and choral heterophony. More recent and more operatic styles are also invoked, Gluck and Wagner making the most significant appearances, but their relationship with Dante’s world are more difficult to define, ultimately giving the impression that they are included as problem - causing influences, reminders that Dante’s work can only be properly appreciated today when the history of intervening centuries is taken into account.

The London Philharmonic  under Vladimir Jurowski were joined for this, the premiere of the completed work, by the German choir EuropaChorAkademie and the soloists Mark Padmore, Tatiana Monogarova, Marianna Tarasova, Joan Rodgers and three boy trebles. The drama, such as it is, focuses on the role of Dante himself, and Mark Padmore’s commanding tenor is the ideal vehicle for this combined role of hero and narrator. Most of his music is recitative, Dante’s sonnets set in a declamatory style with extended melismas circling around small groups of three or four notes. The part suggests comparisons with Bach’s evangelist, a role Padmore will be taking up on this same stage in April for an Easter performance of the St. Matthew Passion.

The other soloists were competent without really excelling, although their opportunities are limited in this piece. The three trebles are given some nerve wracking solo moments, for instance their opening the second act singing unaccompanied from within the audience, but despite a few shaky very high notes they carried it off. Monogarova and Tarasova, both rising stars in Russia’s opera scene, achieved an appropriate balance of operatic flare and medieval piety, although the heavily accented English occasionally jarred. The choir takes the brunt of the work, acting alternately as antiphonal capella and opera chorus. Their ability to maintain tempo and pitch while moving was impressive, especially in their final coda, where they filed out through the audience divided into two parts, one down each side and singing antiphonal responses.

Martynov’s reputation for controversy precedes him, and the composer’s expectations of the audience are perhaps as complex and problematic as the audience’s expectations of the composer. The earliest styles he invokes, the pre-polyphonic chant and the angular organum, are digestible enough, the music of John Tavener a sufficient primer for British ears. But what are we to make of the later operatic allusions? Linking the music’s more operatic tendencies to Gluck is sensible, a composer who helped to define the modern genre, bridging the divides between German, Italian and French styles. Gluck’s commitment to the trombone in the opera orchestra allows Martynov to use this section as a point of continuity between his various historical styles, from the galleries of St. Mark’s to the pit at Bayreuth.

But Wagner, as so often elsewhere, is the real problem here. Martynov provides a pared-down late Romantic operatic discourse, a minimalist Wagner if you will, and writes extended passages in this style without any apparent irony. A rubato turn figure is its leitmotif, projected round different parts of the orchestra and interspersed with a range of Tristan-esque suspensions. In other postmodernist hands, those of Osvaldo Golijov say, this emotive level could be taken at face value as the composer’s chosen language for emotional engagement. But Matynov clearly despises Wagner’s aesthetics, leaving the audience suspicious that the music is drawing them in only to mock their emotional response. Wagner is only one of Martynov’s points of historical reference, but the pity is that the invocation is so rigidly two dimensional  and occupies so much of the score.

The opera was originally conceived as a project for the Mariinsky stage with an envisaged premiere under Gergiev. It has already had incomplete outings, but this concert performance was the premiere of the complete version.  A staged production would do the work more justice; concert performances of operas almost always seem attenuated, a problem exacerbated by  minimalist renderings of established operatic styles. The work’s return-to-Dante approach is effective as far as it goes; the sum total of the mix of styles is a frustration with them all and a desire to get back to basics. Dante’s chaste and devout verses on the nature of love provide the relief that the music continually assures us we are seeking. The message is driven home with the reluctant assistance of a range of operatic voices from down the centuries, all of whom seem exploited in the process. Russian musicians will tell you that Martynov’s music is guaranteed to divide opinion. Mine remains deeply divided.

Gavin Dixon

Dr. Gavin Dixon is a writer and composer based in Hertfordshire, UK<sup>. His web site Musical Miscellany is here.

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